When Sadie Scheffer decided to start her own vegan, gluten-free baking company, the logistics were not her top priority. Like many small food companies without retail spaces, she started Bread SRSLY by delivering her breads and muffins on a bike, using a makeshift online ordering system through email and Etsy, and taking cash on delivery. Scheffer’s system worked when she was fielding a few orders at a time, but when it came time to scale up, it was less than ideal.

Enter Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based startup that provides online tools for small and sustainable food producers. Now Scheffer’s orders come through the Good Eggs online platform, and on top of taking orders from house to house, she now also drops off a lot of product at once at community pickup spots arranged by the company. She sells three times as many loaves of bread as she did before Good Eggs. Scheffer admits that she’s had trouble keeping up with orders, but adds: “That’s the fun part, the scary part, and the only way I’m going to grow.”

When Good Eggs was founded in the summer of 2011, co-founders Rob Spiro and Alon Salant knew they wanted to build “a product and company to serve and grow local food systems,” even if they didn’t know what it would look like. But Spiro and Salant are no amateurs: Spiro is an original co-founder of Aardvark, which sold to Google in 2010 for $50 million, and Salant is a co-founder of a software design company called Carbon Five.

The pair quickly set out to figure out how they could use technology to boost the local food community. They discovered that most small food businesses were built by food people, not tech people, and they were often missing the software they needed for even the most basic operations. Many, they found, were spending time they could be baking, pickling, or curating filling out charts on Google Docs by hand and taking one-off email orders.

As Good Eggs handles the logistics, its vendors are watching sales climb. But whether or not Good Eggs — and other sites like it — will be able to truly enable small sustainable businesses to scale up over the long term (after the trend factor dies down) is an open question. The costs of labor and quality local ingredients are still incredibly high, and while Good Eggs offers some solutions, it’s not a one-stop shop for all local food producers’ problems.

“One of the earliest surprises was that the food industry is not one industry, it’s a dozen industries,” Spiro told me. “So the way that a baker is selling their fresh bread subscription through Good Eggs is totally different than the way a ranch is selling a quarter of a cow.”

Click to see the invite.

Good Eggs launched its own site today, but for the past several months, the team has been building and running online storefronts on 40 San Francisco-based vendors’ websites. For 3 percent of each transaction, the Good Eggs team works closely with each to build a personalized online marketplace. “Our strategy is to align our incentives with the food producers,” says Spiro. The company also helps with marketing and promotion through what it hopes will become a large social media network of its own.

Take the Mission Community Market, a San Francisco nonprofit farmers market. It uses a Good Eggs platform to sell its Chef’s Market Box — a box of locally sourced ingredients with recipes from local chefs — but it also gets the company’s help writing and testing recipes, doing photo shoots, and handling delivery. It’s unclear which of these services will be available to Good Eggs clients in the future, but for Jeremy Shaw, executive director of Mission Community Market, it has made a world of difference. According to Shaw, “Without Good Eggs, the box wouldn’t be possible.”

Good Eggs is neither the first nor the last of the food-related startups scrambling to fill this space. Farmigo was one of the first of its kind when it was founded in 2008, and has since grown to provide 3,100 communities with farm-direct produce and CSA shares.

Plovgh similarly connects consumers with farmers, but gives buyers more flexibility and choice than a typical community-supported agriculture (CSA) box. The New York-based site, FarmersWeb, offers an ordering system for local produce in bulk at wholesale prices. And because customers have to pay in advance, farmers no longer have to track them down and demand payment. Sarah Teale of the Adirondack Grazers’ Cooperative says working with FarmersWeb is “like having an agent.” “I really don’t want to be the one calling the restaurant saying, ‘pay up,’” she adds.

Technology has long played a role in advancing the food system — but that has usually meant the use of chemicals, hardware, and machinery to improve efficiencies. Now, says Danielle Gould, the founder of the website Food+Tech Connect, “technology is becoming increasingly focused on information flow. The internet, software, and low-cost hardware are making it easy for everyone along the food supply chain to connect and coordinate logistics.”

Gould’s hope is that this shift will infuse more democracy into the food system — through access to more information and much more choice in the kinds of foods available.

After all, no matter how ethical and pasture-based the ranch or how local the grains, food companies are only sustainable so long as they can stay in business, and the hope is that new technology will also offer stability.

Of course the irony is that maintaining a diversity of online services isn’t easy. And with all tech bubbles, it’s likely that one or two companies providing infrastructure for local food will outlast the others. But with a growing consumer base for organic food, and farmers frequently faced with more supply than they can sell, these new distribution solutions likely have plenty of room to grow.

As Spiro sees it, “We have a theory that local food as a whole is poised to grow 10 times over. So all ships rise with the rising tide. Farmers markets, food producers, and customers should all win.” So who loses? “Safeway.”

Filed under: Article, Food, Locavore, Sustainable Food]]>http://grist.org/locavore/online-marketplace-set-to-launch-local-food-vendors-into-the-mainstream/feed/0bred_seriously_ordersgristadminbred_seriously_ordersGod Eggs launch posterMapping the government’s local food work as a way to keep it alivehttp://grist.org/locavore/mapping-the-governments-local-food-work-as-a-way-to-keep-it-alive/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/locavore/mapping-the-governments-local-food-work-as-a-way-to-keep-it-alive/#commentsFri, 20 Jul 2012 12:36:39 +0000http://grist.org/?p=118684]]>Click to explore the map of the USDA’s efforts to boost local food systems.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released what it’s calling the “2.0 version” of its Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Compass. For those not in the know, the Compass is a map of all of the local food projects — including farmers markets, food hubs, infrastructure, and producers — the USDA funds.

The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF) initiative itself is the brainchild of USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan — possibly the highest ranking supporter of sustainable agriculture we’ve ever had at USDA — as a way to highlight efforts to aid local foods.

I’m a big fan of mapping as a visualization tool and the Compass certainly provides lots of data. That said, it’s not really much of a consumer-focused tool compared with private efforts like RealTimeFarms.com, which not only maps farmers markets and farms, but also shows the links between particular restaurants and their local artisanal and farm suppliers.

Instead, the KYF Compass is a way to illustrate what Merrigan and her team are accomplishing. The Compass demonstrates the national reach of USDA-funded local food products; there are little dots all over the country and in every state. Similarly, the KYF website has new local food “case studies” that spell out the department’s recent work. Here are some examples:

The Compass also proves that local food isn’t just a coastal phenomenon; it’s thriving in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, too (and also, you know, Micronesia).

The stories themselves are pretty cool, but it’s also worth considering the Compass as a very conscious effort to paint a picture of KYF as benefiting a broad range of regions and businesses.

For example, the local-meat case study in Seattle features a librarian-turned-sausage-maker who wanted to open a USDA-inspected sausage factory in his garage. And, with the help of the right folks at USDA, he succeeded. The Wisconsin story describes a virtuous circle that begins with hoop houses on small farms to extend growing seasons, which led to an increase in so-called “value-added food business” (i.e. artisanal products like jam and pickles), which led to jobs and higher incomes.

It’s worth noting that KYF itself doesn’t provide any new funding — it has simply drawn a connection between preexisting projects run through an alphabet soup of USDA divisions in order to strengthen the message that the agency supports local and regional food. And while it might seem that KYF would be entirely uncontroversial in Washington, it’s not. In fact, almost from the moment of its inception, the effort has raised the ire of Republican lawmakers, who see it as a distraction from USDA’s “real” job of supporting industrial agriculture.

Indeed, the House GOP tried to kill the KYF program last year, along with other attempts at reform. It was an effort that mostly just involved attempts to force USDA to take down the KYF website. KYF survived — but not without a requirement to submit a report of its work to Congress; the Compass is very clearly a part of that reporting.

Not that the GOP was content to leave things there. As we reported back in March, when the Compass was first launched, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, quipped that the whole KYF effort was not “‘steeped in reality’ … since most food Americans consume isn’t grown locally.” Of course, I could argue that continuing to plant millions of bushels of corn in regions that grow more and more drought-prone every year isn’t exactly “steeped in reality” either, but I digress.

The point is that the KYF Compass and the case studies that the KYF website highlights are directed as much at congressional legislators as they are at small farmers and consumers. I’d even go farther than that — the Compass is part of an effort of build a permanent and self-sustaining infrastructure for federal support of local food at USDA, an agency that has, for some time now, lacked it.

Kathleen Merrigan will not be deputy secretary forever — nor will Democrats forever control the White House. And we have seen how quickly a determined effort can dismantle years of regulatory progress (case in point, the George W. Bush EPA). But by demonstrating to Congress and to her own officials and workers the broad reach and significant economic benefits of the local and regional food efforts, Merrigan is likely betting that KYF won’t be so easy to kill.

We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out — but there’s no question that Merrigan knows her way around institutions like USDA. After all, she is the person who not only helped write the USDA organic legislation, but then turned around and implemented it successfully as director of the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service under Bill Clinton, despite industry efforts to water it down to nothing. It may be that she’s attempting to perform a little bureaucratic jujitsu on a rigid agency. Here’s hoping she succeeds.

But “Oh, man — more whole wheat flour!”? Not so much. Yet that may be coming.

On the East Coast, Virginia’s Moutoux Orchards is growing and milling wheat and barley to nestle beside produce, dairy, eggs, and meat in its Full Diet CSA. To the west, Windborne Farm of northern California offers a grain CSA featuring not just wheat and barley, but also rare grains like teff and millet raised using a pair of draft horses.

All over the country, small grain farmers like these may soon place the last piece in the local-foods puzzle.

There is no question that fruits and vegetables have been the backbone of the locavore movement. The number of farmers markets in the U.S. has increased 400 percent since 1994, while CSAs grew from a handful in the 1980s to an estimated 6,500 today. Eggs, meat, fish, and dairy have joined produce in market stalls and CSA boxes, but grains often lag behind.

“There are more small grain growers than a decade ago, but [the] trend here is growing quite slowly and is far behind small-scale produce, meat, and dairy growers,” says Erin Barnett, head of the local food directory Local Harvest. Out of more than 18,600 small farms listed on the website, fewer than 600 grow wheat, and an even smaller number offer oats or rye.

For generations, large-scale agribusiness has been seen as the most efficient way to produce commodity grains, such as corn, wheat, and rice (a fact that may be changing thanks to climate change). Big Midwestern farms churn out enough to feed every American 8.2 servings of grain a day. Farm subsidies (and, increasingly, crop insurance) have also given large farms an advantage for years. Buoyed by this system, large farmers and processors can grow grains at a price much lower than small producers can even imagine.

But as Big Grain has taken over, the variety of seeds available and the wisdom about growing grains sustainably have diminished. Until recently. Now some small-scale grain farmers have stepped back into the fray. They approach it not as direct competitors to commodity grain growers, but as an alternative for eaters in search of healthier, more sustainable options. Such producers claim a corner of the market with sustainable growing methods, value-added products, or specialty crops that customers choose for flavor. In fact, most successful local-scale grain farming relies on all three.

Most small grain growers just got rolling in the past 15 years, but already consumers are smitten. A gluten-sensitive customer of Rogosa raves about an ancient wheat so pure and free of the allergenic protein that she could eat pita again. Grass Valley Grains of northern California ships whole wheat flour to a customer in Waikiki who will bake with nothing else. A San Francisco chef has gushed over cornmeal from South Carolina’s Anson Mills that “made love to buttermilk.” And the Moutoux Orchards CSA? It sold out with its 2011 debut — even with a price tag of $250 per person per month.

“There is a growing contingent of people who put a lot of importance on food quality and safety,” explained Mark Sorrells, chair of the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University. “Also, people want to support local economies and businesses that give back to the community.”

Before farmers can add grain to the local foods picture, farmers have to address some problems unique to these crops. That is where people like Ragosa and Sorrells come in.

For one, thanks to industrial agriculture, the array of available seeds has been winnowed down to very few varieties. And most of these varieties are patented. “This is a global, silent crisis of loss of biodiversity,” says Rogosa. And that biodiversity has only gained in importance as farmers face the increasingly brutal results of climate change.

For Rogosa, farmer-saved seeds — also known as “landrace” seeds — offer economic benefits as well. “Unique varieties help small-scale farmers earn a living and have a niche market,” she says.

Sorrells is focusing on farming wisdom. He noticed a problem when retailers like New York City’s Greenmarket reported that local grain was flying out of market stalls faster than they could stock them. Simply put, Sorrells says, “they can’t produce enough to meet demand.”

The scientists are now working, in part, to find the best seeds in the right quantity, as well as improve knowledge about management — the side of farming focused on fertilization, density of seed planting, and combating pests.

Another challenge stems from the price factor. Once grain farmers supply specialty markets, they have to face the same reality as all local producers — namely that mainstream consumers balk at the price of most of small-scale, sustainably produced foods. While seasonal herbs or vegetables can compete with supermarket prices, shoppers are unlikely to find local flour below $1.25 to $2 per pound.

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, lies in the food system itself. To truly fix grain production, Americans must change the way they farm and eat in a number of ways.

For one, says Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, we may have to eat more actual grain ourselves. “Ninety-plus percent of all the grain grown in North Carolina goes into the mouths of animals,” Roberts says. “It doesn’t actually [feed] people.” If we return to the model used by beloved agriculture pioneer Thomas Jefferson, who saw meat as a condiment, then local grains might sound more affordable. When we see grains not just as cheap fillers, but as unique foods, they become worth a little more investment — both of our money and our culinary attention.

We also have to recognize the power of landrace species. Roberts, who has started giving farmers grants to test such seeds, confirms that they are hardy enough to stand up to erratic weather. “They adapt, that’s what they do,” he says proudly.

And finally, research must appeal to large funders just as much as rogue researchers. This has already begun. Monsanto may not shell out for heritage seed testing any time soon, but the USDA has supported Rogosa’s trials and the research at Cornell.

Will we ever see local grain production scale up like meat and produce have? The next few years will tell. What is certain is that the small-grain influx has refreshed the idea that growers, scientists, and consumers can all play a role in tackling established behemoths and move into a new frontier.

Filed under: Food, Locavore]]>http://grist.org/locavore/small-scale-grains-another-piece-of-the-locavore-puzzle/feed/0Bringing in the sheaves by Elizabeth DyckgristadminAnson Mills Carolina Gold Rice in spoonBringing in the sheaves by Elizabeth Dyck Reed Hamilton on a tractorCommunity-supported agriculture: Grist readers stand up for local foodhttp://grist.org/locavore/community-supported-agriculture-grist-readers-stand-up-for-local-food/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/locavore/community-supported-agriculture-grist-readers-stand-up-for-local-food/#commentsWed, 04 Jul 2012 12:56:12 +0000http://grist.org/?p=115595]]>Earlier this week, we ran an interview with Pierre Desrochers, co-author (with his wife Hiroko Shimizu) of The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet, in which he shared a range of grievances with the local food movement. As you may imagine, there was an outpouring of response by a range of people who disagree with Desrochers. And they made a lot of great points, so we thought we’d highlight some of the better ones here (some are excerpts of longer posts). See the original article to read all 100+ comments in their entirety.

I am a local food advocate for many reasons:Taste: An heirloom tomato picked that morning runs circles around a hybridized tomato picked two weeks ago in Florida and gassed so it turns red en routeQuality: the better the soil and the farmer, the better the food.Nutrition: food sheds nutrients after it is picked. The longer it takes to get to market, the less nutritional value it has, comparatively.Transparency: I like knowing how my food is grown and harvested. I visit my meat producer; try that at a CAFO.Environmental: A minimization of the use of chemicals that wash into waterways, creating algae blooms, choking out life, or kill beneficial insects, including honey bees.Sane stewardship: I like to support farmers who create more naturally fertile soil, which is better able to resist pests, floods, and droughts.Pleasure: I buy local food at my farmers market because it’s more pleasant to do so than going into an air conditioned grocery store. I see neighbors, chat with farmers, taste before I buy.Economic: I want my food dollars to support my local economyHumanity: Animals and humans are treated better on the small farms I know than they are on the large ones.I value green open spaces — Supporting local farms with my money encourages those farmers to maintain those green open spaces rather than selling off to developers.

And, so we’re clear, I don’t have much money. The money I have I spend on good, quality food — for the reasons above.

jessiesunship:

In response to “if you know your farmer and want to help him, that’s fine, but that’s charity.” Well, I know my farmer and I want to help HER. Call it charity if you want, but I chose this and I get awesome food at a bargain price. Agricultural subsidies, on the other hand, are corporate charity and yet, I am forced to support it.

[In response to] “The problem I have with local food activists is that they seem to want to go beyond what’s reasonable in terms of local food. They want to force school boards, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, military bases, and universities to buy more expensive, and often lower-quality, food, just because it’s local.”

Buying direct from the farmer has been shown by researchers to be less expensive or the same price as buying non-local food. (See Iowa State Univ. research, or USDA.)

Additionally, money is retained in the local rural economy. Furthermore, farmers’ markets stimulate neighboring businesses. This has also been demonstrated by researchers in peer-reviewed journals.

tawster:

The great majority of the world is poor and eats fairly locally.

Captivation:

… not to mention the issue of monocultures (both the genes of the crops and our social monocultures too.) Basically monocultures are more vulnerable to disease. That’s why nature favors diversity. Eating local allows genetic and social experimentation to take place. Your town might grow better cabbage while mine might grow better carrots. But both of us will be better off if diversity is encouraged.

Sewassbe:

Buying something just because it’s local is almost as silly as buying something just because it’s conventionally grown. Everyone should take into account quality, taste, and sometimes even price (though quality and taste often trump price with me). And with local food, at least you know where your dollars are going and that they are almost certainly going to be reinvested in the local economy, instead of going into the pockets and investment portfolios of far-away corporate executives.

GreenHearted:

I think another one of the problems is that people are still picturing that their future diet will be the diet they’re able to eat now. No, their diet will consist of whatever some locavores have determined will adapt best to the changing climate in their local soils. Where I live, a farmer is discovering that a diet of fava beans, kale and eggs might survive the ravages of our changing microclimate — until we let the global temperature go so high that nothing survives.

Locawhore:

Let me see if I understand — since the Japanese are dependent on the rest of the world to ship food to them we all should be.

Since there are occasional droughts and crop failures we should burn a whack of petroleum moving cheese around the world just in case there is a local cheese shortage.

Tubbercurry:

Desrochers wants to defend Japanese honor? This is entirely unnecessary. Japan gave the world Masanobu Fukuoka. Desrochers would do well to read Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution and Sowing Seeds in the Desert to learn about what local sustainable food, specifically Japanese, can and does look like. In 1988 Fukuoka received the Magsaysay Award (often referred to as the Nobel of Asia) for Public Service.

Japan is also one of the birthplaces of the Community Supported Agriculture movement. In 1965 mothers in Japan who were concerned about the rise of imported food, the loss of arable land, and the migration of farmers into cities started the first CSA projects called Teikei (提携) in Japanese.

Scott Sklar:

They [doubt] that local food can actually feed the world, yet until 50 years ago, that’s what it did. And while I have nothing against importing bananas and coffee (i.e. those that are sustainably grown), vegetables, dairy products, and meats can be year round. I have grown tomatoes in greenhouses in Montana in winter without a problem. The idea is to maximize regional grown and local grown first, and fill in the gaps thereafter — not the other way around. This practice results in lower carbon emissions, lower energy inputs, and lower water utilization — critical global issues that I believe this book ignores.

I found myself wanting to include so many excerpts from the above article that it just makes more sense to recommend it. Just don’t tell the authors of this book there are agricultural economists (you know, people with expertise in this area), who aren’t down on local food. Notice that small farmers are already figuring out they should band together to increase their clout, even in the presence of subsidies …

The author also seems to argue that only trade gives us the diversity of foods we need, but there have definitely been plenty of examples of isolated systems working just fine. The pre-contact cultures of Polynesia for instance worked out pretty well. It’s true that in case of war, a sudden switch to a local economy is probably not going to work out that great, but then Germany had a lot more going on when it was forced to switch over.

I think the quote that bothers me the most is …”Maybe it is unrealistic to believe small, local producers can literally feed the world —” … EACH small local producer doesn’t HAVE to feed the world, they feed their small local area … that’s the whole point … In doing THAT they DO feed the world. Now , I’m going out to pick my tomatoes & zucchini, can some & share some with the neighbors who don’t have a garden … THAT’S the way it works …

Jake Claro:

I did the research for the following pricing study, and I have to say, the “more expensive” argument is trotted out with reckless abandon. In Vermont, with a very strong local food economy, competition is very strong—particularly for produce, and this shows in the prices.

Deroscher’s comment about not having the extra $0.50 is patently absurd for an economist to make. Dollars in that economic world would be static, but we know that they circulate in an economy and this phenomenon can be represented by multiplier effects.

As a “local food activist,”… I wouldn’t ever suggest a 100% 100 mile diet. I suggest that if a food does grow locally, consume the local varieties (in season and do some putting by). If a food does not grow locally, choose responsibly.

As I’ve been doing this for a number of years, I’ve discovered a farm type that I prefer and may choose food from a farm 110 miles away rather than one 15 miles away because their farming practices are more aligned with my values. I developed these values by beginning locally and learning about food, farms, and farmers.

ianlogsdon:

So, are they suggesting the solution is mass monoculture? Because that doesn’t survive a warming climate and tightening water supply, nor does it solve agricultural runoff or myriad other problems. The solution to the food system is a mix, yes, but massive farms run on non-renewable nitrogen and phosphorous aren’t the answer either, which is part of the world of non-local produce.

Jeffrey Anderson:

I shop at a store that focuses on local organic products called New Seasons (a small chain around Portland, OR). My grocery costs have only gone up about 20% and my food is insanely better quality, doesn’t have pesticides on my produce and the meat isn’t going to go bad in 2 days because it was shipped from Canada. So in that respect, it’s also more economical — I don’t throw away as much food.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu say they know what’s wrong with the food system: local food purists. In their new book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet, the husband-and-wife team (a University of Toronto geography professor and an economist) argue that the excitement over this movement is misguided to the point of having “utterly disastrous” effects. “If widely adopted,” they write, “either voluntarily or through political mandates, locavorism can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case” [emphasis theirs].

Desrochers and Shimizu are not the first vocal critics of the local food movement. James McWilliams is well known for his early contrarian views on local food (and a resulting book about it), as is Stephen Budiansky, whose 2010 New York Times article prompted an in-depth debate here at Grist. Like these folks — and a whole array of others — the authors of Locavore’s Dilemma argue mainly that food miles are a misleading and often incorrect gauge of the sustainability of one’s food.

We don’t entirely disagree. A dogmatic approach is rarely a good idea, and questions about where food should be grown and why are indeed complex. But does that mean things are great the way they are?

Most of us eat local foodfor a combination of reasons — from taste, to personal health, to food-chain transparency, to concern for workers, to a desire to see a stop to industrial farming practices that damage soil health and biodiversity, to an interest in keeping small farmers in business. And, realistically, most of us compromise for reasons of cost or convenience. Yes, there are Portlandia-level locavores out there who take it a little too seriously, but the vast majority of us see local food as one piece of a much larger shift. Maybe it is unrealistic to believe small, local producers can literally feed the world — but does that mean we shouldn’t support their efforts at all?

I sat down with Desrochers when he was in town last week to see if there was something to the anti-locavore argument. As you might guess, there’s a lot he and I don’t agree on. But at Grist we try, when we can, to challenge our views.

Q.Why did you decide to write The Locavore’s Dilemma?

A. To save my marriage. My wife and I attended a meeting in 2007 where a prominent academic came to my university who took the idea of local food to its logical end and said if you live beyond your local foodshed, you’re essentially a parasite. He said the most parasitical people in the world are the Japanese — look at all the food they import. My wife was born and raised in Tokyo. She made me promise that I would do something about it. My original goal was to write a four-page memo explaining comparative advantage and that when people don’t have land to grow food, like in Japan, it makes sense to do something else and then trade that with people who have enough land to grow food. Then I realized there’s a lot more to the local food movement than that, so maybe I should address food security and those other issues. So the four-page memo became a 25-page policy paper, and eventually a book offer came along. So that’s how I got into it — to defend my wife’s honor.

Q.Was there anything that surprised you as you got deeper into the issues?

A. I was surprised by the number of local food movements I discovered in the past, but I was not surprised to see that they all failed. There was a local food movement in the British empire in the 1920s. And it turns out that even the British empire was not big enough to have a successful local food movement. The first world war cut Germany off from the rest of the world, so they had to revert to local food. And of course people starved there, and they had a few bad crops, and all the problems that long-distance trade had solved came back with a vengeance.

Nobody would bother importing food from a distance if it did not have significant advantages over local food. [In the book] we talk about food miles, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the arguments — transportation is a tiny thing [in terms of climate impacts], and if you try to cut down on transportation, then you need to heat your greenhouse as opposed to having unheated greenhouses further south. Then your environmental footprint is actually more significant.

Q.Most people who strive to eat locally aren’t motivated by food miles alone.

A. No, they do it for the taste and stuff, which is fine, but it’s an upper-middle-class movement. Don’t pretend that local food can help feed the world or help people of lesser means; it will remain a niche market targeted at the upper crust of society.

Q.I don’t know — there’s a growing effort to address problems of food access and insecurity by supporting urban farming in low-income communities, or connecting food-insecure areas directly with local farmers. It doesn’t look like an exclusively upscale fad to me.

A. The problem in the United States is not food deserts per se, it’s a problem of social policy. It’s terrible public schools, high crime rates — food is part of the broader problem, but as an urban analyst I would tell you you’d be better off teaching people in inner cities marketable skills, and they’ll be able to have a productive life and afford decent food whether it be local or [from] elsewhere.

Q.So do you see any value to supporting a local food system?

A. Good local food will always find a seasonal market. We don’t need a local food movement for that. The problem I have with local food activists is that they seem to want to go beyond what’s reasonable in terms of local food. They want to force school boards, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, military bases, and universities to buy more expensive, and often lower-quality, food, just because it’s local. We’re in the business of educating students, not feeding them local food. It should not be the university’s role to keep inefficient local food producers in business.

Q.Many people value local food because of the transparency it provides; they trust a local farmer more than the industrial food system. What are your thoughts on that motivation?

A. You should not be naïve about farmers markets. A farmers market typically will only ask a signature of people [wanting to sell]. We don’t dispute that most people at local farmers markets are honest, but like everything else in life you have a few bad apples.

There are economies of scale in food safety, too. In a large processing plant they have safety procedures along the way. Small farmers, no matter how well-intentioned they are, don’t have the knowledge and the capacity to have safety measures at every step of the way. Sure, there are a lot of recalls [of industrial agriculture] that we can track through the news. But it’s not that things are getting worse; it’s that we’re better able to track the problems with large firms.

If you know your farmer and want to help him, that’s fine, but that’s charity.

Q.What would an ideal food system look like to you?

A. It would be very diverse. Our model in the book is New Zealand. They almost went bankrupt in the early 1980s, and they had to scrap all their agricultural subsidies. If you scrap the subsidies, you will have small operations that will target niche markets, but mass commodities will either have very large privately owned operations or very large producers’ cooperatives made up of many small producers who agree to work together.

Q.So you’re not arguing we do away with local food altogether.

A. No. Good food has to be produced somewhere, and some of that could be in your neighborhood. But don’t make it mandatory, and don’t make a religion out of it, and understand that it often doesn’t make sense to have an extremely diversified local food system. You should stick to what you’re doing best, and then trade with others, and that way everybody will be better off. And don’t pretend that [local food] is helping the Earth — [it’s] just producing a niche product for upper-crust consumers.

So again, if [local food] was purely voluntary, we would not have bothered writing the book. But increasingly there’s a coercive element to it which we don’t like. And ultimately the Japanese are not parasites. They just don’t have enough room to grow their food.

Filed under: Locavore]]>http://grist.org/locavore/local-haterade-authors-say-locavores-do-more-harm-than-good/feed/0locavores-dilemma-book-cover-hpclairekt615pierre-desrochers-hiroko-shimizulocavores-dilemma-book-coverPushing for local food in the farm bill: An interview with Chellie Pingreehttp://grist.org/farm-bill/pushing-for-local-food-in-the-farm-bill-an-interview-with-chellie-pingree/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/farm-bill/pushing-for-local-food-in-the-farm-bill-an-interview-with-chellie-pingree/#commentsWed, 06 Jun 2012 12:09:25 +0000http://grist.org/?p=109984]]>Rep. Chellie Pingree speaks with a young farmer.

Does local and organic food matter more to people in Maine than it does to other Americans? It’s possible, but Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) insists that’s not why she introduced the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, a small but encouraging set of legislative reforms meant to accompany this year’s farm bill.

And while the “marker bill” has yet to be embraced entirely, some parts of it have clearly influenced the Senate’s draft of the larger farm bill, which is said to be about to hit the Senate floor this week. Most sustainable food advocates have seen it as a welcome push for small-scale agriculture, after decades of federal support for industrial farming.

We spoke with Pingree recently about bill, the work behind it, and her motivation to get a farm bill passed before the last one runs out in September.

Q.You’re on the Armed Services Committee. Do you have any thoughts or ideas on how food security and national security are tied together?

A.One of the challenges of conventional agriculture — whether it’s the use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides, or how food is grown and distributed — is that it’s energy-intensive. There’s a general agreement, at least among people like me, that national security is better served if we’re not so dependent on foreign oil and other sources of energy. The more you can localize your food system the better off you are.

Q.So what can Maine gain from the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act?

A. There’s a huge growth in interest on the part of people in buying more food locally, whether it’s going to farmers markets, shopping directly at a farm, or joining a CSA [community-supported agriculture program]. The average age of our farmers [in Maine] is going down because more young people are engaging in farming or staying on the farm. And the number of farms under cultivation is actually increasing. We see this trend in Maine as a huge opportunity. It’s allowing a lot of farmers to come back. The market for organic milk, for example, has completely changed over the last 20 years.

Tourism is our largest industry. People come to Maine to eat our lobsters, but they also want to eat our spinach, sweet corn, and tomatoes.

Q.What does that have to do with shortening the supply chain?

A. Basically by creating more opportunities for accessing your food locally. One such program is the Farmers Market Promotion Program, to promote greater awareness of local food production. So you can meet local farmers, look them in the eye, ask questions, and eat samples. We have other programs to improve distribution and aggregation — making it easier for small-scale farmers to sell their produce.

Q.You mean like food hubs?

A. Yes. And there’s a lot of conversation about that. We have some examples of food hubs in Maine and we’re anxious to see that model replicated elsewhere.

Q.We’re in the middle of an election cycle. Does Congress really have an incentive to pass a farm bill this year given the level of divisiveness between both parties?

A. I have no crystal ball. That said, the Senate has moved the bill through the ag committee and the [House] chair has a commitment to bring that bill to the floor of the House. The Senate will likely take up the bill this month and we’ll know whether they can get enough votes to pass it. If not, we’ll start over next year.

Q.So which have the most impact, states with the most resident farmers or the states with the most farm lobbyists?

A. There are farm lobbyists working on every possible issue down to the most minuscule detail, and that includes lobbyists working on behalf of sustainable and organic farming and young farmers. There are good advocacy groups on all sides here. Admittedly some of the big interests have more muscle behind their lobby. But the truth is the farm bill affects all regions of the country in different ways. Over 80 percent of the dollars in the farm bill are for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP] and hunger benefits programs. So the greatest impact will most likely be on low-income citizens who are scattered throughout the country.

Q.Are we getting to the point where food production and food assistance should be uncoupled from one another? They’re interrelated, but aren’t they separate sets of problems?

A. Linking food subsidies like SNAP benefits and farm procedures and processes has a lot of history in Congress. Changing that is one of the many reforms I’d be happy to see. But I don’t expect in this particular era we’re going to be able to. Frankly we’ll be lucky if we eke a farm bill out the door or even manage to extend provisions of the farm bill beyond Sept. 30 without radical change.

Q.Is there anything in the proposed farm bill that members of the food movement could get excited about?

A. One them is organic certification cost share, so if you’re a farmer that wants to convert from being a conventional farmer but you think, for instance, there’s a better market for organic milk, there’s a federal fund to help you make that transition. That fund is now at $80 million, a big increase over what it was before.

Q.You’ve served in the state House and now Congress. How much of an effort is it to pass legislation as big and unwieldy as the farm bill?

A. It’s an enormous effort. My staffer Claire Benjamin has done an incredible amount of work over the last two years basically to both write the title that we’re currently talking about and then to organize advocacy groups and to work with committee members. As much as anything, because I just joined the agricultural committee during this session, it’s been a big effort of getting to know my colleagues, and then finding like-minded members of the House both on and off the committee, and then working with 200 or so advocacy groups around the country that have endorsed our bill. So each one of those groups required a variety of conversations.

Q.Are you up for reelection this November and if so what role does the farm bill play in electoral politics?

A. Yes. Everybody in the House has to run every two years. So this is the election year for all of us. I may or may not be back. I will say it’s a popular issue with my constituents, but that’s not why I did it. I did it because it’s a great opportunity. I’m passionate about the topic and I’m an organic farmer myself.

Before I came to Congress I owned an inn and restaurant and we’ve added an organic farm to our operation. And I’m lucky enough to have help doing it. So when I do talk to people about actual issues of certifying a creamery or getting organic certification or any of the things farmers need to go through, I know what they’re talking about and I understand the process.

Ever since McDonald’s introduced a pair of Slow Food-inspired McItaly burgers last fall, the company has caused quite a stir on the boot-shaped peninsula. The international chain collaborated with Gualtiero Marchesi, one of Italy’s most renowned chefs — and the only Italian chef to date to receive three Michelin stars — to create the sandwiches. In the process it has also raised big questions about whether a fast food chain can ever truly adopt a Slow Food approach.

Although McDonald’s maintains a fairly consistent core menu around the world, it’s not uncommon for the fast food chain to tailor its restaurants regionally. In Japan, the chain serves ramen noodles, for instance, while the Indonesian menu offers the “McSatay,” and the Indian menu includes something called a “Veggie McMuffin.” Even proud McDonald’s France, otherwise known as “MacDo,” dishes out a popular petit dejeuner-cum-McBreakfast, composed of buttery croissants and cafe au laits, known as “McCafes.”

In Italy, home of the Slow Food movement, the new sandwiches were named Adagio and Vivace(names that Marchesi says represent an integration of two competing philosophies: slow and fast). They wereboth made with some local and traditional products, such as eggplant, spinach, and the Italian cheese ricotta salata. Several of the products were DOP certified, an acronym that stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta, a widely recognized certification of regional authenticity.

The two sandwiches were a hit. Due to customer demand, they appeared in the stores for nearly two months longer than the initial three-week “limited time offer.” But their popularity among Italians has also reinvigorated the debate among the Slow Foodadvocates whocriticize the fast food industry’s wanton neglect for local food communities and traditions.

In fact, Slow Food International, a global grassroots organization founded in 1989, made a public statement against the McDonald’s partnership with Marchesi, rebutting the product’s slogan “Fast food has never been this slow” with its own version, “Fast food has never been or will be slow.” Roberto Burdese, president of Slow Food Italy, told the U.K.-based Independent he saw the new menu as “a cynical marketing ploy.”

An ad for an earlier incarnation of the McItaly burger promised Italian beef.

“I don’t really see any kind of change in McDonald’s approach,” says a Slow Food employee who requested that his real name not be used (for understandable reasons). We’ll call him Dario Altieri.

“Their sandwiches are mainly still made with poor raw materials, the working conditions are extremely bad, and even more important their sandwiches are extremely unhealthy. So maybe they’re trying to refresh their image but they’re definitely not changing their approach.”

This is not the first time the Golden Arches and the snail have crossed swords. In fact this most recent clash recalls Slow Food’s own dramatic debut 25 years ago, in response to the McDonald’s entrance into the Italian market. When the chain opened on the Spanish steps in Rome, the newly formed Slow Food took a stance by organizing a highly popular protest in the form of an eat-in in front of the restaurant. And thus this crucial debate for food-loving Italians began.

Although Slow Food differs greatly from McDonald’s in both values and approach to food, it has grown into a major cultural force in the last two-and-a-half decades. And while McDonald’s may now have 419 restaurants in Italy, and employ 14,500 people, Slow Food has over 100,000 members in 150 countries.

To hear chef Marchesi talk about the collaboration, you might think that he was changing McDonald’s from the ground up. In a McEurope press release he said:

… when I began to observe closely, without prejudice, the young, I wondered ‘Where are they going to eat? What do they eat?’ … If it’s true that the haute cuisine changed the taste, now it’s time to present this change to everyone, starting with the youngest. The real news is that with these two sandwiches I opened the doors of the burger kingdom with eggplant and spinach. It’s a big revolution!

Altieri, on the other hand, didn’t see the menu items — or the marketing behind them — as a move toward collaboration. Let alone a revolution.

“It was a sort of counterattack against us,” he says. “It is pretty clear that Slow Food declared war on McDonald’s. The fact is that McDonald’s never did the same, simply because they know they are superior in terms of power and resources.”

That is, until now.

“Keep in mind that in the same month they proposed those sandwiches, they opened a selling point close to Bra [the hometown of Slow Food Founder Carlo Petrini and the organization’s main headquarters],” Altieri adds. These combined efforts, he believes, “can be only considered as a provocation.”

But McDonald’s denies this. Agnes Vadnai, vice president and spokesperson of McEurope, says the plan to include more regional flavors isn’t new.

“A course [of action] began more than three years ago when the company offered recipes closer to the local taste,” she says.

“With the support and endorsement of the Minister of Agriculture, McDonald’s began to make a concerted effort to use local ingredients such as parmigiano reggiano and speck [prosciutto] that were IGP and DOP certified.”

This approach enabled the chain to expand to other parts of Italy. Vadnai says the goal has also “always been to bolster the local agrarian economy and assimilate to Italian food culture and traditions.”

As you might guess, Altieri doesn’t see the burger’s toppings as making a big enough dent in the fast food chain’s overall practices. And he points to the fact that, indeed, “fast can be slow” in some instances.

“I’m pretty sure that we’ve all misunderstood the concept of ‘fast food,’” he says, pointing to the fact that all over the world people have eaten real food on the run, on the streets, while working, etc. As examples he cites arancini — the fried rice balls served on the street in southern Italy — and sushi, which became popular in Japan when more people needed to eat on the go. “The problem,” he adds, “is that this kind of food has been exploited and impoverished by the economic politics of multinationals like McDonald’s.”

Filed under: Food, Locavore]]>http://grist.org/article/with-the-mcitaly-did-mcdonalds-truly-go-local/feed/0gualtiero-marchesi-macdonalds-adagiogristadmingualtiero-marchesi-macdonalds-adagiomcitalyBlame it all on my roots: Local food sees a resurgence in the Southhttp://grist.org/locavore/blame-it-all-on-my-roots-local-food-sees-a-resurgence-in-the-south/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/locavore/blame-it-all-on-my-roots-local-food-sees-a-resurgence-in-the-south/#commentsMon, 28 May 2012 13:06:00 +0000http://grist.org/?p=107737]]>A still from the documentary Eating Alabama.

People in Alabama love to gather and, when they do, it’s usually around football or religion and it is always fortified with plenty of food and drink. What would happen, the organizers of a recent event called the Alabama All-Star Food Festival wondered, if you gathered people just for the eating and drinking — and elevated the discussion of local food in the region while you were at it?

Yes, there was pulled pork and white bread drowning in sauce, but the convention center where the recent All-Star Food Festival was held on account of rain was also full of Gulf shrimp and grits, local gumbo, crab cakes, and of course cold cans from Good People and Back Forty, two of the state’s three microbreweries. The building filled up with farmers, chefs, and food pioneers celebrating a new wave of Alabama food, and wafting over the sterile convention center air was the smell of a place regaining its culinary roots.

As agriculturally rich as Alabama is — both in soil and tradition — the state produces less than 5 percent of the food consumed there. In recent decades Alabama has moved far away from its small-scale farming roots toward concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), raising large numbers of chickens and hogs, and families indentured to corporate agriculture. In fact, just this year, Gov. Robert Bentley (R) cut state funding to Alabama’s Farmers Market Authority, which runs 30 markets throughout the state (another 45 are outside of state control).

Edible revival

Panelists at a discussion of the local food economy at the recent Alabama All-Star Food Festival.

Just 10 years ago it would have been impossible to draw 500 participants and over 30 food vendors and producers to an event focused on local, sustainable food. And the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network (ASAN) has a lot to do with the grassroots movement behind the change. For a decade the nonprofit has been gathering small-scale farmers and ranchers throughout the state in an effort to organize, educate, and network producers and consumers.

“Most of us are contrary farmers. We like to work independently,” says Tom Simpson, executive director of ASAN. “So asking them to participate in an association is difficult. We recognize that and we don’t want to be making edicts to farmers out of Montgomery.”

ASAN has created a food guide (soon to be available online) to connect people to healthy food in the Huntsville, Birmingham, and Mobile areas. They’ve also recently turned their efforts toward policy in the state capital of Montgomery.

“We’re trying to pass a bill that offers restaurants a 4 percent sales tax rebate when they buy food locally,” says Simpson. “We’d like Alabama to follow North Carolina and incentivize state institutions to buy 10 percent of their produce from state farmers.”

Measures like that could keep millions of dollars in the local economy, rather than sending them to food distributors elsewhere. The bill, however, could hit a big, red wall in the state capital.

The energy and excitement in Alabama, for now, lives on the ground level. There are over 1,000 farmers in the ASAN network, and another new organization, Front Porch Revival (FPR), launched recently with the goal of identifying, celebrating, and promoting local artisans throughout the state.

Rob McDaniel, executive chef at Spring House Restaurant and a founding member of FPR, says he hopes to connect producers to restaurants with questions like: “I need [local] eggs, where can I get them?”

“Quality and commitment to sourcing locally are the key factors to this alliance,” McDaniel added, while speaking on a panel at the All-Star Food Festival. “We want beer makers, cheese makers, dairy farmers, beef producers. We’d love to have an artisan and urban farmer in every county.”

The panel made for an illuminating cross-section of the state’s new food revolutionaries. Opposite McDaniel sat Andy Grace, a young documentary filmmaker who grew up in Alabama and recently settled back in his home state, where he is now a film professor at the University of Alabama and the director of the new documentary, Eating Alabama. Grace recognized that in the largely rural, deeply conservative state, the “notion that local food is an elitist, urban luxury is an obstacle.”

Next to Grace sat Frank Randle, a barrel-chested, deep-voiced rancher reminiscent of John Wayne. He and his sons raise cows on pasture at Randle Farms. He emphasized the word “commitment” on the part of the farmer and the consumer in order to propel the state out of its industrial agriculture malaise. Beside him sat Mark Bowen, the education director at Hampstead Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable growth through education, agriculture, and design in Montgomery. Bowen noted the if Alabamans consumed just 15 percent of their food from local Alabama sources they’d keep $980 million dollars in the state, and ultimately enable the farmers there to lower their prices with increased demand — a win-win.

A food hero

Hampstead Institute’s Director Edwin Marty was also a key organizer of the festival. Marty returned to his hometown of Birmingham after learning to farm sustainably on the West Coast and abroad. He founded Jones Valley Urban Farm (now Jones Valley Teaching Farm) on an abandoned lot near downtown Birmingham in 2001. That kind of tenure places Edwin alongside the state’s renowned chefs and farm-to-plate pioneers Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings, as Alabama’s original local-food revolutionaries.

Marty appreciates that others are following in his footsteps, seeing beyond the commodity crops and CAFO-heavy agriculture in the region and recognizing opportunity in the untapped market.

If Marty has his way, he’ll also find a way to lure other former Alabama residents back to rebuild the food system with him. “We’re a tight-knit community with a few local heroes,” he says. “But it’s wide-open territory. There are so few CSAs, so little competition, and so much opportunity to move back here and fill that void.”

Sterilize your jars in a large pot of boiling water. If you’re making refrigerator jam (it will keep nicely unprocessed in the fridge for two to three months), skip this step.

In a four-quart, non-reactive pot, bring the rhubarb, sugar, and tea to a boil. Add the vanilla bean, lemon, and salt to the pot and let it bubble gently for about 10 minutes (on my stove, this means I set it to medium-high). After 10 minutes have elapsed, add the pectin, stir to combine, and let cook for a few more minutes.

At this point, dip a spoon in the jam and see how it coats the back of the spoon. If you get a nice, even sheet, the jam is done. You can also taste at this point, to see if you like the balance of flavors. Add a little more lemon juice if you feel it needs additional brightening.

Pour into hot wide mouth jars, remove any spillage, and apply lids and rings. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Remove from water and let cool.

It’s delicious on toast. If yours turns out more syrupy than jammy, serve with pancakes or waffles and tell everyone you did it on purpose.

It’s a dreamy combination of hipster clichés: an urban farming-themed pop-up store made of salvaged materials. In Brooklyn. Maybe that’s why, when Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply opened at the beginning of April, founder Meg Paska thought, “We’re going to get mocked.” But mockery did not ensue; instead, an enthusiastic community response showed that Paska was on to something with this small, seasonal shop catering to the needs of people growing food and raising animals in the city.

Paska, who blogs about her own backyard garden, chicken coop, and beehive at Brooklyn Homesteader, started Hayseed’s with the folks who run Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Queens. The store will be around until early July in a space Paska rented from the design studio Domestic Construction. We chatted with Paska recently about the project.

Q.How did Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply come together?

A. My business partners and I both kind of have our own urban farm things going on. We were talking one night over beers, and we both admitted that we had thought about opening a farm store. But we were concerned about retail spaces being really expensive. We kept our ears to the ground and hoped that something would present itself, and it did. A bunch of friends of mine had posted a Kickstarter campaign for a design studio a few blocks from my house. They were going to try and save the lot next to their studio and turn it into an urban farm. I asked them how they would feel about hosting a pop-up store, and they were really into the idea. Their studio is in a big mechanic’s garage. They rented out the front space to us and then actually built out a storefront with pallets and old wood. We didn’t spend a single cent on materials; they built it all with salvaged objects.

Most of the Hayseed’s store is made out of re-purposed objects like these shipping crates.

Q.Why did you see the need for a place like Hayseed’s?

A. As someone who raises chickens for eggs, I struggled to find quality feed at a reasonable price. I am really into a small feed company in Virginia called Countryside Organics, but when you have the feed shipped it doubles the price. There are a lot of other people who raise chickens in the five boroughs here, and they were experiencing that same thing. I started posting on the Just Food City Chicken meetup group’s message board asking who would want to go in on ordering a full pallet [of feed]. The response was overwhelming.

Getting straw and hay delivered to Brooklyn is nearly impossible. It’s difficult to find places to dump bulk loads of soil and stuff, too. Most people don’t want to have a big pile of manure-based compost dumped into their [yard]. We’ve been fortunate this season that the gals at Domestic Construction allowed the use of their lot to do this. We’ve gone through about 60 cubic yards of soil in the month and a half that we’ve been open.

Q.As someone who was doing urban farming on her own, what’s it like to connect to the community through this project?

A. When you’re in the store and you have people coming in asking questions all the time, it makes you realize how much you know, and how much you don’t know. It’s given me confidence, but it’s also given me an opportunity to spot areas where I could improve my knowledge, which is ultimately what I want to do — keep learning and getting better at what I do every day. I’ve learned quite a bit from being questioned on things that I’d never really considered.

Q.What range of farming experience do you see among your customers?

A. We get a ton of people who think they don’t have the ability to grow anything. We give them suggestions for things they can grow easily — foolproof crops with a really high rate of success. Most of the people around here don’t know anything about fertilizing, and we have a whole array of organic fertilizers.

We do workshops every week, on [everything from] beekeeping to raising chickens. We’re doing a small livestock workshop this week, we’re doing a gardening-for-flower arrangements class, we do some on basic container gardening, and then we have a really fun workshop coming up on vegan gardening techniques — using fertilizers that are not animal-based, low-impact gardening, and finding ways to control pests without spraying a bunch of stuff.

Q.What other projects do you have going besides Hayseed’s?

A. I’m writing a book on urban beekeeping. I’m starting an educational homestead in New Jersey at a place called Seven Arrows. We’re hoping to create a place where people can come to get away from the craziness of the city, but also learn more about growing food. We’re going to put all the infrastructure in place late this summer, and then by early 2013 we’ll be in full swing. The goal is to create a hub for learning in the region.

Q.What’s the plan for the store from here?

A. We’re open for another month. We’re going to end [the store] no later than early July. The last two weeks we’ll do a lot of sales and start doing workshops on how people can prep for their fall garden come late August, and then we’ll close up shop. If the numbers reflect a sustainable operation, we’ll do it again next year. All our overhead [for this year] has been paid off, so anything that we sell from here on out is gravy.

We’re just trying to get people pumped on growing their own food, and we want to give them the confidence to get started.

The WaPo story was based on a national phone survey conducted by the Kellogg Foundation, which found that the majority of Americans are trying to eat more fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, are shopping at farmers markets at least on occasion, and say they know “a lot or a little about where their fresh fruits and vegetables come from.” These findings are interesting — and they speak to the success of a whole array of efforts to get more of us cooking, examining what we eat, and honing in on the place where healthy and truly delicious foods intersect.

Less visible in the media landscape is the fact that the Kellogg Foundation survey also suggests that all this healthy eating has Americans looking outside themselves.

For one, they’re considering the environment — 64 percent say it’s “very important” that produce be grown in an “environmentally friendly way.” And the same number of people say it’s “very important” or “somewhat important” that produce be organic.

Beyond these basic humanitarian instincts — and despite the apparent popularity of Tea Party politics — the survey also suggests that Americans look to our public institutions to play a part in ensuring healthy food access:

81 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., needs to do more to increase access to locally produced fresh food in communities throughout the country.

86 percent strongly or partly agree that state and local officials should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

89 percent strongly or partly agree that the community should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should shift its support more toward smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers and away from large farm businesses.

83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should provide more incentives to encourage the creation of new businesses that sell, process, and distribute locally produced healthy food.

It may be too late for this data to influence the current Farm Bill process — which has taxpayers slated to support those “large farm businesses” with tens of billions in subsidies while offering a few million here and there for “smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers.” And that’s the best-case scenario put forth by the Senate; the worst case (the House of Representatives’ version) would also involve tens of billions in cuts to SNAP — the very program that is proving crucial to fresh produce access.

Either way, it raises the question: Is this data a snapshot of a trend that has peaked and will now begin to reverse? Or are we seeing the early signs of a larger shift toward a saner, and — yes — a crunchier, leafier food system?

Filmmaker Hailey Wist’s documentary The Garden Summer is the true story of five strangers picked to live on a farm, work together, and have their lives taped. Wist recruited four other good-looking 20-something suburbanites to spend the summer on an Arkansas farm, getting all their food (except booze, coffee, and cooking oil) either from their own garden or from within a 100-mile radius.

So what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real on a farm? Well, like the original MTV reprobates, they drink, get in arguments, and have romantic entanglements, sometimes with the same people. But they also learn about where their food comes from, and about wasting less and living simpler.

The cast — I’m calling them The Filmmaking One, The Wholesome One, The Ethereal One, The Sardonic One, and The Mustache, based solely on their pictures — makes the original Real World look like a Benetton ad. I’m pretty sure every season had The Token Minority One, sometimes even The Token Minority Several, but this cast is whiter than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And every single one of them is in a creative field — filmmaking, writing, illustration, photography. Now, I’m not saying that necessarily means they’re all incredibly privileged; I’m just coughing really loudly and it happens to sound like that’s what I said.

So OK, maybe this is less the Real World of farms, and more the Girls of Real Worlds of farms. But it looks like they’ll touch on a lot of questions that many of us have — could I be completely self-reliant for my food? Could I learn to waste less? Could I get by eating entirely local? It sounds fun to watch other people doing the experiment, so you can learn from their experience before you try anything yourself. Because you know your version would be way less picturesque and have no soundtrack.

Lynne Curry has always considered herself a locavore, but her food choices changed drastically when she moved from the Washington coast to a grassland ranching community called Wallowa in Eastern Oregon. Near the coast, she had eaten mostly vegetarian, with some fresh fish now and then. But in Wallowa she found that eating responsibly and supporting her local community meant buying and eating grassland beef (in large “shares”). Drawing on prior culinary experience from stints working in several high-end Pacific Northwest restaurants such as The Herb Farm and Willows Inn, Curry created recipes for every cut of meat on the cow.

With her first cookbook, Pure Beef: An Essential Guide to Artisan Meat with Recipes for Every Cut, Curry shares those recipes. She also suggests reaching into the freezer and grabbing whatever cut comes to hand, then paging through her book for a recipe. We caught up with Curry recently to hear about her decision to write the book and the lessons she’s learned along the way.

Q. When did you realize you wanted to write this particular cookbook?

A. I always knew I wanted to do a book, but when I saw an article in TIME magazine about cow-pooling, I knew it was this one. It was the first thing I had seen outside of my community that reflected the relevance of this topic back to me.

But many articles about grass-fed beef only go so far, and then leave you hanging. To make this a viable choice, people need to know how to apply cooking methods.

Q. The book is so comprehensive, covering everything from how grass becomes beef to the basics of butchery. Can you talk about your research process?

A. One of the main things I wanted to do was make sure I could understand and interpret scientific research for consumers without adding to the contention about food choices.

I had an amazing cohort of primary sources, such as Bob Dickson, a leading meat scientist in Oregon; I talked extensively to Cory Carman of Carman Ranch about her ranching practices; on the nutrition front, I consulted with Dr. Lauren Gwin at the American Grassfed Association. I also talked to people at the Niche Meat Processors Assistance Network.

One of the best resources for me was from Union of Concerned Scientists. They did a report about grass-fed beef called Greener Pastures. It helped me put the pieces together. Anyone making choices about what kind of beef to eat should read it.

Q. I liked the moment in the book when you describe being vegetarian and eating beef that was offered to you in Guatemala. You say you weren’t consciously thinking about right versus wrong, but it plays into your overall food choices. Do you think that sense of pleasure spurred you to look for a humane way to eat meat?

A. In that moment, I was completely pulled out of my own context. This 80-year-old woman unexpectedly handed me some beef, and it was an amazing gesture. Everything else faded and the flavor of this meat was in Technicolor. My true confession is that I stopped eating red meat because I didn’t like it, but I loved that beef! It wasn’t until later that I realized what I had in Guatemala was grass-fed.

My commitment is to eat local, and to eat the best quality food available. My choice to eat meat only came from being in a foodshed where this is an available food source. Once I moved here and saw how the animals were raised and saw the whole lifecycle, I felt okay about making this choice.

Q. Pure Beef is obviously a cookbook all about beef, but do you think Americans should be eating more beef?

A. Exactly the opposite. I think we need to be eating less. With this book, I wanted to model a way for people to integrate meat in a holistic way.

In the book, I decided to do whole meals, rather than single recipes. I wanted to show alternatives to each person eating a whole steak. The portion sizes in my book are smaller, and the meat is integrated into a whole meal with a lot of produce.

Q. How do you feel that small-scale ranching addresses some of the problems of food waste?

A. There is attention to usability built into the ranching system. It comes from a rural tradition of taking advantage of available resources and putting things back into the cycle.

Q.There are so many voices out there talking about the best way to feed the planet. How do you square meat-eating with those questions?

A. This is such a hard topic for us right now. I don’t believe we can have a healthy, well-rounded ecosystem completely without meat, but the decision to eat meat is intimate and complex. I wanted to make a book free of judgment for people who already made their choices, and give them the tools for those choices to be fulfilling and pleasurable.

Q. Any recipes that gave you a challenge?

A. I found short ribs to be a challenge. They are always different — some are really fatty, some have a smaller proportion of meat. I finally landed on a ginger-glazed short rib that I’m proud to share. As I talked about earlier, I tested all these recipes with grass-fed beef, so these recipes really are tailored to this kind of meat.

Alan Flippin comes from a long line of North Carolina tobacco growers. But, a few years back, the crop just stopped making sense. His family’s operation stopped making much of a profit as the cost of fertilizer and other inputs rose. And, Flippin says, “I don’t really enjoy growing tobacco; I don’t use it. I was looking to get into something else.”

He wanted to transition to growing produce instead — something he could feel good about cultivating, eating, and selling. But shifting to a completely different crop is a hugely risky proposition. “With tobacco, you pretty much know how to grow it; you’ve got a market, and you get insurance for your crops,” Flippin says. “Whereas for produce, it’s very scary because there’s so much you don’t know.”

Flippin’s fledgling produce operation got off the ground with the help of a grant from something called the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund. The grant enabled him to build a greenhouse and experiment with several varieties of organic vegetables to sell to wholesalers, farmers markets, and at a local co-op.

The fund was created in the wake of the Tobacco Master Settlement to help North Carolina’s agricultural communities transition to new sources of income. According to the terms of the settlement, announced in 1997, the country’s four largest tobacco companies would make perpetual payments to 46 states to compensate them for smoking-related health-care costs and, in tobacco-growing states, economic losses (four other states already had individual agreements with tobacco companies).

A percentage of North Carolina’s settlement money goes to the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund, which is a program of the nonprofit Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI).

Jefferson Herr, owner of Herr Flower Farm, is a recipient of funding from the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund.

“The idea,” says Joseph Schroeder, the fund’s director, was to “fund farmers to take that first step in discovering new, innovative ways of making money off farms. In turn we would make them share their lessons and business plans with their community.” Tobacco comes with many of the same issues as other commodity crops (those grown at a large scale and sold to the commodities market, such as corn, wheat, and cotton): It’s a monocrop that requires large amounts of pesticides, depletes soil, and is susceptible to disease. And tobacco locks farmers into a dependent relationship with the corporations who buy their crops and provide them with seeds and pesticides.

The transition from commodity crops to more diverse, locally focused operations can be jarring, and hard for farmers to make on their own. As Flippin noted, small and mid-scale farmers rarely have the security of crop insurance, which makes it much easier to get loans. “Getting that capital infusion [from the Fund] was a big boost to us,” Flippin says. “It really got the ball rolling.”

Beyond the struggle to access capital, Schroeder says, “the thing about commodity production — and tobacco is one of the best examples of this — is you don’t learn how to do everything you need to do to be an entrepreneur. All you learn how to do is grow the product.”

In addition to money, the grant gave Flippin access to guidance from a regional expert and support from a network of grantees around the state. And, true to the other end of the deal, Flippin’s business now serves as a model for how a farm can transition from tobacco to produce. “We’re one of the farms everybody’s looking towards to see if we actually make money or not,” he says.

Though the fund was originally intended for tobacco growers, it’s now open to anyone who earns the majority of their income through farming. In addition to grants for individual farmers, the fund awards community grants for collaborative efforts, and the range of projects they’ve have supported — over 500 in the last 15 years — is an inspiring testament to the potential of farmers’ innovation.

Meredith McKissick, who grows flowers, got a community grant to buy shared-use equipment for a farmers’ co-operative she belongs to near Asheville, N.C., and later served on the review board that selects grantees.

“It was a super amazing experience for me to see all the different farmers trying to be innovative,” she says of the review process. “There was one fellow who had been [raising chickens] and had been asked to make upgrades he simply couldn’t afford, so he was forced out of his contract. His family banded together and decided they would turn one of the chicken houses into a creamery for dairy goats. Despite his age, he was starting over from scratch. That made me feel like there was hope for some of these growers getting squeezed out.”

Schroeder explains that while other states often funnel settlement funds toward a few specific crops and farming practices, in North Carolina, they “trust the farmer to be the expert.”

That strategy has paid off: Schroeder says RAFI’s surveys report that over 80 percent of the projects it’s funded are successful after three years. And because of the requirement that proposals be replicable — ideas that other farmers could learn from and adapt — the success of any one project has a resounding impact. A University of North Carolina study [PDF] found that each dollar awarded to a farmer through the reinvestment fund generates a whopping $205 of local economic activity, and that each grant creates an average of 11 new jobs in one year.

The fund is based on some pretty simple principles: Support farmers with new and creative ways to make a living off the land; encourage them to share their ideas and inspire others; and in the process, revitalize rural economies once dependent on commodity crops. It’s exciting to imagine how this model could be applied to other industries — corn, industrial livestock, even coal and oil.

Sadly, the fund has taken a bit of a financial hit. It’s fully funded by the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission, which was nearly eliminated in the state’s recent budget crisis; instead, it went from distributing $35 million to just $2 million. That means this year, the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund was only able to give out 34 grants compared to last year’s 181 grants. But the ripple effects of the fund will hopefully continue to widen, especially as recently funded projects grow.

Flippin, for his part, feels that his years of produce-growing trial and error are about to pay off. “The broccoli’s looking great, the zucchinis are looking great, and the tomatoes are looking great,” he says. “It’s finally all coming together this year.”

When it comes to giving more people access to fresh, healthy food, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has turned a great deal of its focus in recent years toward farmers markets. And, more specifically, opening farmers markets up to Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) or “food stamp” users.

In fact, the agency reports, spending at farmers markets under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already jumped by 400 percent since 2008 — and that’s with less than a quarter of the country’s 7,000 markets participating in the program.

“That’s a huge transformation in the farmers market world, in terms of people being able to feel like they’re invited to the party,” USDA deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan said in a phone interview.

Expanding SNAP at farmers markets is part of the agency’s broader approach to increasing healthy food access for low-income communities that lack adequate grocery stores and public transportation — areas known (if sometimes controversially so) as food deserts. So when this year’s budget talks came around, the USDA requested $4 million to expand the effort. (Cost is a major reason why more farmers markets don’t already participate: SNAP benefits are redeemed through the EBT system, which relies on wireless technology, and that doesn’t come free.)

Today, the USDA announced it will begin to allocate funds to states with the greatest numbers of EBT-less farmers markets. The states will then decide how best to spend the money for each market: Some may purchase just the wireless equipment, others may buy the equipment and hire someone to manage it, or make other investments that will help manage the program effectively.

Because of that variation, it’s not clear how many more markets will now start redeeming SNAP benefits, but Merrigan estimates that the machines could reach an additional 4,000 farmers markets.

She hopes those markets will help break some of the stereotypes that have developed around eating and cooking with fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

“Twenty years ago or more, people thought this was something for the elite. Clearly that’s not the case, and the expansion of farmers markets with EBT has really proven that,” Merrigan added. And she’s optimistic that more time spent at these markets can lead to other healthy lifestyle shifts as well. “Hopefully some of those people are going to farmers markets on their bikes and walking,” she said.

That said, use of SNAP at farmers markets isn’t going to be the solution that solves all the country’s food problems, and Merrigan recognizes that.

“There’s no silver bullet,” she added.

And because someone will be able to buy local kale or fiddlehead ferns using EBT doesn’t mean they’re going to have the time or experience to cook them. For that reason, Merrigan emphasizes SNAP as a piece of a broader, multi-pronged approach, which includes: “getting access to the food, figuring out what to do with it, and then understanding why it’s important.”

But while this effort by the USDA won’t produce miracles, it will likely give more SNAP users — many of whom do cook at home — quicker, easier access to fresh produce. And that’s no small part of the battle. As Merrigan said, “Getting people to those markets is inviting them into really healthy eating.”

Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.

In California, a handful of local craft brewers are starting to tap into that primitive connection. Taking up the motto “Beer is agriculture,” Almanac Beer Co. works directly with farmers in the greater Bay Area to source specialty ingredients for their seasonal brews. “For most people, beer is what shows up in the bottle or can,” says Almanac brewer Damian Fagan. “We’re trying to create a foundation that beer is rooted deeply in agriculture.”

Fagan founded Almanac with Beer & Nosh blogger Jesse Friedman last year, after they met in a home-brewing club, where they traded brewing experiments. (“I’d show up with a fig beer or a puréed turnip beer. Not always great ideas,” Fagan admits.) The two instantly bonded over their interest in San Francisco’s farm-to-table food culture. “We saw a real opening to think and talk about the brewing process using that same vocabulary and ideology,” says Friedman.

From the farm to the barrel

While the term terroir is usually reserved for fine wines, Almanac has found creative ways to “infuse a sense of time and place in each brew,” as Friedman says, by integrating fresh produce into the mash.

Like the Farmer’s Almanac, each brew serves as a record of the season. The Autumn Farmhouse Pale Ale celebrated the last of the area’s fall plums, while the Winter Wit preserved the end of December with a mix of Cara cara, navel, and new blood oranges. “If we’d brewed two weeks earlier or later, the mix of oranges would have been different,” Friedman notes.

Their most recent release, Bière de Mars (March beer), is a French-style farmhouse ale highlighting baby fennel. While fennel might sound like an unexpected choice for beer, Heirloom Organic Gardens farmer Grant Brians thought it made a lot of sense when Almanac approached him. “The flavors in fennel are carried in an oil and slightly alkaline base,” he explains. “It’s perfect to mix into the brewing process.”

The goal with each brew is to provide a distinct but subtle accent that does not dominate the flavor profile, but adds depth and pairs well with seasonal dishes. “We want the ingredient to be an integrated part of the beer,” Friedman insists. “It should not be a fennel cocktail.”

How’s the finished result? “It’s good!” says Brians. “I’m generally a wine drinker, but I enjoy full-bodied and well-balanced flavors in beers. And it was nice to taste the end result of our collaboration.”

Bottlenecks for local brewers

While Almanac has sourced some local grains for their brews, including wheat from Massa Organics, brewing a truly local beer is fraught with challenges when it comes to hops and barley malt. “Unfortunately, the beer world is defined by the big American brewers,” says Friedman.

California was once home to a thriving hops industry, but by the 1950s, the mechanization of hops harvesting, outbreaks of downy mildew, and changing beer tastes wiped hops growers out. Today, the majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Sourcing specialty malt poses another obstacle, since there are no malt houses in California, and out-of-state industrial malting facilities prefer to work with large brewers. “You can grow high-quality barley here, but the issue is malting,” says Ron Silberstein of Thirsty Bear Brewing Company. “Part of the problem is that local growers are competing with commodity growers who can grow and malt their barley very inexpensively.” Organic malt from locally grown barley is even rarer.

San Francisco’s first and only brewery to carry a seal from organic certifier California Certified Organic Farmers, Thirsty Bear experimented with brewing a 100 percent local and organic beer in 2010, collaborating with nearby Eatwell Farm and Hops-Meister, a hops farm. Since there are no local malt houses, Eatwell had to ship its barley to Colorado Malt Company, which hand-malts in small batches.

In launching the Locavore Ale, Silberstein had hoped to enlist more local craft brewers to commit to purchasing organic malting barley from Eatwell Farm, but the buy-in wasn’t there, and the farm has since abandoned the project.

“You have to get enough brewers who want to tell a story, who want to have an heirloom varietal of the barley, and who are willing to pay a premium for that,” Silberstein says. He is hoping to build momentum to start a small artisan malting facility, which would make local, small-batch malting more feasible.

While the process of reconnecting local brewers and beer drinkers with local farms still has a long way to go, Silberstein and Friedman are optimistic that the farm-to-bottle movement is growing. “We need to build larger systems to support local brewing, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to tackle,” says Friedman. “In the meantime, we’ve contented ourselves with highlighting specialty ingredients from local farms.”

This beautiful interactive chart from U.K. organization Eat Seasonably may not apply precisely to your climate, and it’s pretty British in other ways too — “courgettes” are zucchini, FYI. But I love the concept — a handy calendar showing you what fruits and veg are in season at what times — and I love the idea of having a star vegetable or three for every month.

For parts of the U.S. this will already be a decent approximation (and if you live in one of those, you can download a poster-sized, though non-interactive, version). For the rest of us, maybe we need some localized versions for other parts of the globe?

Update: Oooh, they have some of these already, though not interactive and not free. You can buy “food wheels” showing what’s local and in season for the New York area, the Bay area, and the Upper Midwest.

I was recently struck by a promotion I saw on the site Local Harvest, which lists organic and locally grown food around the country. The site reads, “Many farms offer subscriptions for weekly baskets of produce, flowers and other farm products. Try a CSA this year!”

“A subscription to local farm products?” I thought. “Is that all community-supported agriculture has become?”

As the local food movement has gone from a trickle to a sweeping current, and sales of local farm products have grown, it seems that many community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscribers may have lost touch with the original intention behind the term. As a farmer, and one who’s researched and written about the history of CSAs in the U.S. and abroad, I find this trend deeply troubling. It seems many urban residents now see the CSA as just another form of “retail farming” rather than a model for civic agriculture, a site-specific form of solidarity, or associative economics that can transform relationships.

In 1986, when the farmers behind Indian Line Farm and Temple-Wilton Community Farm started the first CSAs in this country, they were seeking solutions to the farm crisis that was driving people off the land. The number of family-scale farms was dropping every year. The work of food production — not to mention all of the risk — fell on the farmers, while prices rarely covered the costs of production, let alone provided a living wage. The CSA model invited local consumers to share the harvest and the risks by paying in advance for a whole season. They would feel a sense of ownership in the farm, and they took whatever the farm could produce in return.

The farmers at Indian Line Farm literally divided up the harvest of each week’s crop equally among the shareholders. Everyone participated — harvesting, weeding, or helping with distribution, promotion, or administration. Temple-Wilton separated the food from the price-per-pound mentality by summoning all members to an annual meeting where they made bids for payments to cover the farm budget. Once the season began, members took the amount of food they needed regardless of how much they had paid.

The value of commitment

Today, while many models like this still exist, there are also some CSAs that have abandoned entirely the notion of sharing the risk. In crowded markets like the San Francisco Bay Area, farms like Full Belly Farm and Capay Organic allow members to join for as little as one month. Farm Fresh to You, Capay Organic’s produce box service, and one of the largest in the country, advertises: “Customer Friendly, Flexible, Convenient — Cancel anytime — No commitment.”

The popularity of the CSA concept has also spawned imitators with no farm base at all, who use the local farm connection to lure customers to their convenient box delivery schemes. One local food service claims to run “very much like a community-supported agriculture, or CSA program.” But the entrepreneur-owner does not pay the farmers in advance or share the risk with them in any way. As the Wisconsin-based FairShare CSA website puts it, “These ‘box schemes’ source products from all over the country or world, just as most grocery stores do … You don’t build a relationship with any of the farmers involved and it may be difficult to even find out where something really came from.”

Dave Runsten of Community Alliance with Family Farmers in California tells me that the Department of Food and Agriculture in that state is working on an official definition of CSA. Runsten says the state plans to define single-farm CSAs and multi-farm CSAs, and they’re considering banning the use of the term by anyone buying from wholesalers or not requiring advance payment. That’s a start, but what about sharing the risk?

The United States Department of Agriculture defines CSA this way: “CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.”

Meanwhile, Angelic Organics, a biodynamic farm in the Chicago area that supplies over 1,000 shares to members, describes the relationship in more colorful language:

When you sign up, you dedicate yourself to being our customer for the year, thus providing us a secure market — a welcome measure of certainty in the fickle world of farming! We, in turn, dedicate ourselves to being your farmers, providing you with a varied, nutritious vegetable diet. We do our very best to bring you a beautiful and bountiful box each week, but since our boss, Nature, provides no guarantees — we can’t offer any either. One of the premises of a Community Supported Agriculture program is that the shareholder shares, through the veggies, the farmers’ experience of nature’s mischief (and blessings).

Beyond convenience

In the 25 years since the first CSAs appeared, thousands of farms have adopted the model. Farms ranging in size from half an acre to hundreds of acres have benefited from the support of steady season-long sharers. The CSA model has also inspired and enabled an astonishing variety of farm-based projects with social service missions like the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, Calif., which employs homeless people, and Red Wiggler Community Farm in Pennsylvania, which gives meaningful work to adults with developmental disabilities.

Member involvement also varies tremendously. New York’s Genesee Valley Organic CSA and Missouri’s Fair Share Farm stand out as rare farmer-customer co-operatives — all members contribute, either by taking a core group job or helping with farm work and distribution. Vermont Valley Community Farm in Wisconsin recruits 50 of its 1,250 members to work as harvest crew, exchanging labor for vegetables. Still other CSAs make farm work voluntary or offer discounts to members who provide drop-off points.

Committed CSA members have also been known to make additional investments and loans to farms in need. This is a phenomenon I know firsthand. When my own farm, Peacework Organic Farm, needed financial support to secure land a few years back, our CSA members pitched in so that a local land trust could buy the farm and lease it back to us.

This isn’t the kind of community that we should take for granted.

And while some commercialization may be inevitable when a product of counterculture enters the mainstream the way the CSA model has, the conversations I hear about how “inconvenient” it is for consumers are missing the point.

As I see it, reducing CSA to a mere food box subscription scheme would castrate the CSA model, taking away its power to create lasting relationships between the people who grow and eat food. As Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini would say, CSAs allow citizens to become “co-producers” with their farmers, rather than passive consumers.

At their best, authentic CSAs are a win-win-win. Farmers get living wages and freedom from worry about profits and losses. Everyone weathers the tough times and benefits from the good times. Nothing goes to waste, and community investments help pay for land and equipment. Most of all, eaters get healthy food, good company, and the deep — if not always “convenient” — satisfaction that comes from playing an immediate role in transforming the food system.

Mary Davis started feeling the squeeze of city life about a year ago. She had grown up gardening and spent a stint working on an organic farm while attending grad school in Missouri. Now an architect living in San Francisco’s Mission District, she longed to reconnect with her gardening roots, but her small apartment was lacking in the dirt department. “There was no garden, no outdoors,” she says. “I really wanted a place with some soil.”

She started looking around her neighborhood and fell in love with the historic Dearborn Community Garden. But when she inquired about getting a plot, she was told there was a 22-year waiting list.

She signed up nonetheless and continued her search, adding her name to the Potrero Hill Community Garden’s list as well, which had a comparatively modest seven-year wait. Since then, Davis has moved into a house with a shared backyard garden, but she still longs for a plot of her own.

Davis’ experience is not uncommon among would-be gardeners in San Francisco. Most of the city’s community gardens have waiting lists of two years or more, according to Public Harvest, a new report by San Francisco Urban Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR). The most comprehensive report of its kind in recent years, it paints a sweeping portrait of the current urban agriculture landscape and presents a bold agenda to help San Francisco meet the demands of a burgeoning movement.

From commercial urban farms to rooftop plots and shared gardens, more than two dozen private and public urban agriculture projects have sprouted up in the city over the last four years as a result of the resurgence of interest in gardening. “We need to start looking to our public land to meet this demand,” said SPUR program manager Eli Zigas at a recent press event at Michelangelo Playground Community Garden in Nob Hill (pictured below).

Since the dissolution of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) in 2004, there have been no centralized city-funded efforts to maintain or expand urban agriculture. Residents hoping to start new projects face many bureaucratic hurdles, since public land and urban agricultural activities are managed by multiple agencies, with little coordination.

Photo by Adam Alpern.

While San Francisco Recreation & Parks oversees 35 community gardens on public land, those gardens are generally operated by volunteers, not staff. “The gardens are run by gardeners,” says Andrea Jadwin, a founding and active member of San Francisco Garden Resource Organization (SFGRO), which offers support and training for community gardeners throughout the city. “That’s good and that’s bad because some gardens aren’t very well run.” Garden managers are often inadequately prepared to deal with issues like vandalism or garden members who neglect their plots while waiting lists grow. “If there were an agency helping people run the gardens better, it’d be easy to keep them going with minimal budget,” she adds.

According to SPUR’s findings, San Francisco’s urban agriculture program is middling compared to other large cities. With an annual operating budget of $800,000, or about $6,600 per site, San Francisco spends more than New York but far less than Seattle, which invests $11,900 per site.

Taking SPUR’s findings and recommendations to heart, San Francisco Supervisor David Chiu has proposed new legislation that would create a strategic plan and a centralized program to streamline the management of urban agricultural projects, either through the city or a city-funded nonprofit.

The proposed ordinance includes a six-month audit of city-owned building rooftops that could be used for urban agriculture, the creation of a “one-stop shop” for individuals and organizations looking to engage in agricultural activities, and the establishment of garden resource centers that would provide residents with compost, seeds, and tools. By 2014, Chiu aims to develop at least 10 new urban agricultural projects on public land and reduce waiting lists for plot-based gardens to one year.

Zigas emphasizes the minimal cost of such a program for the returns it offers to the city of San Francisco, such as greening the urban landscape and reducing stormwater runoff, which in turn reduce public spending on landscaping and sewage treatment.

He also notes the benefits of urban agriculture for San Francisco residents and the food system at large, connecting city dwellers with the miracles and challenges of growing food. “I think many gardeners in San Francisco have a great appreciation for a fresh tomato because they know how hard it is to grow a tomato,” says Zigas. “There are a lot of people in the city who learn about food and how it’s produced through that process.”

Having been a member of White Crane Springs Community Garden in the Sunset for nine years, Jadwin has witnessed the benefits that such spaces offer by bringing neighbors together.

“People garden for the same reasons they go to the farmers market,” she observes. “You see your friends and neighbors. You talk about the weather and what’s in season. It not only allows people to have a broader connection to food, but it also builds community.”

Filed under: Food, Locavore, Urban Agriculture]]>http://grist.org/urban-agriculture/san-franciscos-urban-ag-spansion/feed/0sf_community_garden_jeffc-hpgristadminSF_community_garden_JeffCSF_community_garden_AdamAlpernLet’s put an end to ‘dietary tribalism’http://grist.org/sustainable-food/lets-put-an-end-to-dietary-tribalism/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/sustainable-food/lets-put-an-end-to-dietary-tribalism/#commentsTue, 24 Apr 2012 20:39:55 +0000http://grist.org/?p=94796]]>Every time I’m on social media, I am reminded of a growing trend that worries me — let’s call it dietary tribalism. I use this term to refer to the many fractured groups with conflicting dietary views who, for the most part, don’t realize just how much they have in common.

This recent piece in the New York Times about the “challenges of plant-based eating in a meat-based world” got me thinking, as it described several people’s efforts to adopt a vegan lifestyle and how they were fraught with challenges. Not only did I find this lens problematic (for one, not everyone finds the transition that difficult), but I was struck by how it repeated a familiar, yet inaccurate frame: that one is either a vegan or they’ll eat an entire cow in one sitting.

But it bothered me even more that the comments turned, predictably, into “veganism isn’t natural” vs. “everyone should go vegan.” It was almost the perfect microcosm of what happens in the food world when, rather than discuss issues we have in common, we take sides. All this mud-slinging detracts from a more important conversation.

As I see it, all Americans need to eat more plant-based foods and less processed food, and to be more mindful of where their food comes from, how it is grown, how the people who grow it are treated, and how our dietary choices affect the environment. Instead of these core messages sinking in, dietary tribalism is rampant these days. You have — just to name a few — the Paleo folks, the vegans, the raw vegans, the low-carbers, and the fruitarians. And while there is certainly something productive and empowering about engaging and connecting with like-minded individuals, these groups often turn into echo chambers where everyone agrees and, occasionally, points out how one or more of the other tribes has it all wrong. Meanwhile, Big Food continues churning out a litany of highly processed junk, young children are developing Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”), genetically modified crops — and the pesticides they’re engineered to resist — are seemingly everywhere, and food support for the poor is seriously threatened.

In all our “no, but I have this mountain of research to back me up” statements, we easily overlook one critical unifying point — we’re all seeking out the same goal: health.

Regardless of our views on tofu, raw milk, and coconut oil, most of us who are passionate about nutrition and wellness are not happy with the Standard American Diet or the fact that highly processed and minimally nutritious “foods” are the norm. The fact that millions of Americans have minimal access to fresh, healthy food angers us. We don’t want kids’ food pumped with artificial dyes. We can’t believe it takes more than 30 ingredients to make a Dunkin’ Donuts blueberry cake donut. We are appalled at what the average elementary school student is fed in the cafeteria. We are terrified of Monsanto’s ever-tightening vice grip on global agriculture.

Of course we’re going to have differences. I certainly don’t agree with the schools of thought that consider fiber meaningless or think fruit should only be eaten on its own before noon or the idea that all humans must eat meat. And I laugh a little when I hear people tell me they think all whole grains and beans are “poisons.”

As a nutrition professional, I will set the record straight when I see basic nutrition information grossly distorted, and when I see food companies attempt to pass off highly processed junk as “better for you” simply because, say, the sugar has been replaced with aspartame.

But it’s the back-and-forth mud-slinging between members of different “dietary tribes” that troubles me most. I often imagine all the power that could be harnessed if we stopped and joined forces on some key issues, such as: getting food dyes and trans fat out of our food supply, demanding that the presence of genetically modified organisms and artificial hormones (at the very least) be labeled, ridding schools of nutritionally empty foods, and bringing more access to healthy foods in “food deserts.”

The past few weeks have seen the “pink slime” debacle, the arsenic in chicken feed horror, another crack down at a giant egg facility, and various food recalls (sushi tuna “scrape” being the latest). These are the issues that should awaken us from our dietary bubbles and get us thinking about the bigger picture. And yet, we are often told to pick one food system issue and privilege it over all others, rather than make space for multiple, complex possibilities.Takethis recent Freakonomics video, for instance, which asks: “Does Eating Local Hurt The Environment?” It argues that eating less meat is more important than eating local, rather than making a place for both approaches.

Coalition politics are often the key to paradigm shifts. And it’s more than possible to disagree with someone on nutrition issues and still have some common goals. Who, after all, can claim to be against a better food system? Now, more than ever, the grass-fed beef advocates and the tempeh fans need to be sitting at the same table.

If your football team can’t hack it on the field, perhaps they can grow some kick-ass kale.

At least that’s the sentiment from Dallas’ Paul Quinn College. After the university cut its football program, President Michael Sorrell decided to transform the unused field into a working farm.

The WE Over Me Farm, which covers 57,000 square feet, was a response to the lack of healthy food options in the economically depressed area. Highland Hills, the neighborhood where Paul Quinn is located, is a designated food desert.

The field-to-farm conversion began in 2010. Today, WE Over Me grows corn, tomatoes, blueberries, squash, herbs, bees, and greens. The fresh produce, which is cultivated by Paul Quinn’s students, goes to the college’s cafeteria and to local restaurants. The college is even working on creating a social entrepreneurship program to teach students how to run a farm — from planting the seeds to selling the veggies.

This may be the first time that anyone in Texas has chosen farming over football, but hopefully it won’t be the last. WE Over Me is the perfect example of how tilling unused land can combat food deserts.

Filed under: Cities, Food, Living, Locavore, Sustainable Farming, Sustainable Food, Urban Agriculture]]>http://grist.org/list/texas-college-turns-football-field-into-awesome-urban-farm/feed/0tomatoesseparsonstomatoesFowl play: Raising illegal backyard chickens [VIDEO]http://grist.org/urban-agriculture/underground-chickens-video/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/urban-agriculture/underground-chickens-video/#commentsSat, 21 Apr 2012 13:30:09 +0000http://grist.org/?p=94269]]>Backyard chickens are everywhere. But in many North American cities, keeping a flock of hens is still illegal. We met up with some unlikely outlaws while traveling through Tennessee who are breaking the law by producing fresh farm eggs in their backyards.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the courts have recently told the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) it has to regulate several commonly used antibiotics if they can’t be proven safe. The ruling was the result of a long-running lawsuit by a group of environmental and public health advocates lead by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and gave many in the food movement a reason to feel cautiously optimistic.

Meanwhile, the FDA has been moving at a glacial pace on its expressed intention to put a voluntary control on antibiotics in place. And this week it finally put the rubber to the road, in the form of a major press effort and the release of a new set of guidelines for cooperating companies. (The two events are supposedly unrelated, but it’s not hard to see how FDA may want to distract attention away from a court order that requires it to play the bad cop, if it can play up and formalize its role as good cop.)

The agency’s press release is even called “FDA takes steps to protect public health,” and in it the agency promises to “promote the judicious use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals” [emphasis mine]. FDA also comes right out and acknowledges that “antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria or other microbes develop the ability to resist the effects of a drug. Once this occurs, a drug may no longer be as effective in treating various illnesses or infections.” In other words, the agency is talking. Whether it’ll do any walking to go along with it is yet to be seen.

At the center of the FDA’s narrative is the role of the veterinarian — who, the agency says, will “supervise” the use of antibiotics to “prevent, control and treat illness.” As TheNew York Times put it: “Farmers and ranchers will for the first time need a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals.”

But just how hard such a prescription would be to get raises big questions. You see, livestock producers already often work with veterinarians to help craft their regimens of “subtherapeutic” antibiotics. And just because those veterinarians must now cut through more red tape doesn’t mean they’ll ultimately authorize fewer drugs in the animals’ feed.

The meat industry will always argue for the right to treat sick animals with antibiotics. Of course, the mere fact that those animals are kept in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) means that if they don’t get a preventative course of antibiotics, they’re likely to need them later, when the pathogen-filled living conditions do eventually make them sick. And in the eyes of most industrial-scale farmers, there really is no difference between “preventative” dosing and dosing to make the animals grow faster.

The outlined process appears to give the companies the opportunity to relabel drugs currently slated for growth promotion for disease prevention instead. Such relabeling could allow them to sell the exact same drugs in the very same amounts.

Oh, and did we mention that the industry even has a full three years to do this relabeling? Not to sound too skeptical, but this might be more of a distraction tactic than meets the eye.

2. Another big egg factory gets cracked wide open

Still haven’t phased those really cheap eggs out of your diet yet? Well, the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) is working hard to ensure that the conditions inside America’s industrial egg farms stays on your radar. This week, HSUS released gruesome footage of hens in cramped, dark battery cages captured over a six-week period inside Pennsylvania’s Kreider Farms. The story got the attention of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, as a convenient follow-up to his arsenic-in-chicken piece from the week before.

And we should probably watch video footage from inside CAFOs while it’s still being made, since the “ag-gag” bills (or bills that would make it illegal to capture such footage) appear to be coming back with a vengeance in farm states. But really — after years of this kind footage popping up, and the resulting attitude of business owners like Ron Kreider (who actually had the nerve to tell a reporter this week that “more than 80 percent of our chickens are housed in larger, modern cages”), it’s getting harder and harder not to generalize. In other words, if a farmer (or any other food production business for that matter) doesn’t want you to see what they’re doing, they’re probably not making anything you’d want to eat.

From the kind-of-boring-sounding-but-actually-very-important department, this week the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on “nutrient overload” — the phenomenon that occurs when too much nitrogen from the synthetic fertilizer on large farms enters surrounding waterways. The report, which is titled “Troubled Waters,” focuses on the four states in the core of the Midwestern corn belt — Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — and calculates that removing nitrate alone from drinking water costs taxpayers more than $4.8 billion a year.

Writing on their Farm Plate blog, EWG staffer Don Carr describes the impact on water in the area, saying:

The city of Des Moines, Iowa has one of the largest water treatment plants in the world to clean agricultural pollution. Toledo, Ohio, estimates that it costs an extra $2,000-to-$3,000 a day just to deal with agricultural pollutants in the city’s water.

He suggests that the answer is to tackle the problem at the source, literally, by ensuring that today’s farm subsidies are tied to conservation efforts (i.e. making sure big farms only get paid if they agree to do things like reduce fertilizer use or filter water through wetlands). Otherwise, Carr adds:

Taxpayers end up paying twice, once for the subsidies that encourage all-out production and again for the cleanup. Meanwhile, farm businesses reap year after year of high income and federal subsidies whether they are protecting or polluting drinking water.

An industrial corn planter. (Photo by Minnemom.)

4.EPA refuses to take a critical look at 2,4-D, Monsanto’s new favorite herbicide

A few months back, we reported on 2,4-D, the pesticide that sounds a little like a Star Wars character. The herbicide — which was used in Agent Orange — is generally sprayed on lawns and has been around since World War II. But the NRDC has been raising concern about the toxicity of 2,4-D, ever since Monsanto announced it was developing a new round of GMO seeds that would be bred to be resistant to the chemical. (Just to review, plants grown from resistant seeds can stay alive under near-biblical floods of pesticides while, in theory at least, everything else dies).

It’s also noteworthy that 2,4-D hasn’t often been used on corn fields. (Perhaps the plants weren’t quite resistant enough?)

Anyhow, the NRDC sued the EPA, in part to get a response to a 2008 petition to re-examine the chemical’s safety. The Center for Food Safety — which appears to be working closely with the NRDC — cites a scientist on its website who says that the use of the new GE 2,4-D corn “will trigger an astounding 30-fold increase in 2,4-D use on corn by the end of the decade, assuming widespread planting.”

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the EPA has decided the herbicide will remain on the market for now, saying it “found no cause for concern.” Meanwhile, the USDA is still taking comments until April 27 on the GE seeds.

With green favas, pearly couscous, and sweet shallots, this warming sauté is both comforting and light. (To make it more entrée-like, toss in some feta and toastedpistachios.) Buy the freshest favas you can find as older beans can be starchy.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Crack the fava pods and squeeze the beans into a bowl. Rinse. Boil the beans for two minutes; then remove with a slotted spoon to a colander and rinse again to cool. Transfer to a small bowl. Add the couscous to the same pot and boil until al dente, about five minutes, skimming any scum that rises to the surface. Drain; rinse briefly to prevent clumping.

While the couscous cooks, use your thumbnail to pierce each fava’s outer shell. Squeeze the dark green inner beans into a bowl; discard the shells.

In a large skillet, warm the olive oil over medium-high heat until almost shimmering. Add the shallots, ¼ teaspoon salt, and a grinding of black pepper. Sauté until the shallots are golden brown and starting to crisp, four to five minutes, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Reduce the heat to very low, add the favas, and stir until warm and glossy, three to five minutes longer. Test one bean; it should be tender.

Add the couscous to the favas along with the olives and some of the lemon juice, to taste; stir until hot. Adjust the salt and pepper. Garnish with the mint and lemon zest.

Tip: Consider preparing this dish with a friend. It’s nice to have company when you shuck the favas, as this can take a bit of time.

Polenta-stuffed chard. Photo by Paulette Phlipot

Polenta-stuffed chard with bubbly parmesan

These gorgeous green parcels, best eaten on a Sunday night in front of a fire, are both dramatic and comforting (think lasagna, but without the pasta, ricotta, or mozzarella). Buy the largestSwiss chard leaves you can find, and keep in mind that the polenta takes an hour to chill.

In a medium saucepan, bring 3 cups water and 1 teaspoon salt to a boil. Whisk in the polenta and reduce the heat to a gentle gurgle. Cook until thick, 10 to 15 minutes, whisking occasionally. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter, half the cheese, and a generous pinch of black pepper.

Scrape the polenta into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Cool for 15 minutes at room temperature, then refrigerate until cold, at least one hour. (After one hour, cover with plastic wrap.) Unmold and cut into eight 4 x 2-inch rectangles. Wipe the baking pan dry and spread 1⁄2 cup of the marinara along the bottom.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and bring a kettle of water to a boil. Have several layers of paper towels on hand.

Make a narrow, upside down V-shaped cut about halfway down each chard leaf to remove the thick central steam. Place the leaves in a large bowl and cover with boiling water. Let soften for six minutes. Remove to the paper towels and pat very dry.

To form the rolls, lay one chard leaf on a cutting board. Lay one polenta rectangle horizontally along the bottom of the leaf and spoon one teaspoon of marinara on top. Roll the leaf upwards, burrito-like, encasing the polenta, and transfer to the baking pan seam side down. Repeat, nestling the rolls next to one other. Spoon the remaining sauce on top and sprinkle with the remaining cheese.

Bake for 10 minutes, then slip under the broiler for one to two minutes to brown the cheese. Serve hot.

Filed under: Article, Food, Locavore]]>http://grist.org/locavore/the-perfect-meal-for-early-spring-recipes/feed/0favas_couscousgristadminfavas_couscousswisschard2ripe_book_coverFarm Bill 2012: ‘It’s a mess, but it’s our mess’http://grist.org/farm-bill/farm-bill-2012-its-a-mess-but-its-our-mess/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/farm-bill/farm-bill-2012-its-a-mess-but-its-our-mess/#commentsThu, 12 Apr 2012 12:45:52 +0000http://grist.org/?p=92489]]>Daniel Imhoff began writing about the farm bill before today’s so-called Good Food Movement took hold. In 2007, in an effort to make accessible the giant piece of legislation that touches on everything from food stamps to farm subsidies, Imhoff wrote Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill. Then last year (after editing the influential CAFO Reader), Imhoff revised the book just in time for Congress to craft the 2012 Farm Bill, which narrowly escaped getting passed behind closed doors last fall but is nonetheless shaping up to be “the worst ever.”

Imhoff spoke with Grist recently about democracy, debate, and the multiple ways the farm bill resembles the Olympic Games.

Q.What is the most important thing you hope your readers will get from this edition of Food Fight?

A. That the farm bill is a really great privilege and opportunity. It’s our chance as a democracy to try to make things better in the food system — to help people get something to eat, to help farmers get through the season, and to try to help protect the land and the resource base.

So even though it’s a mess, it’s our mess. And if we really want to right the food system, it’s just one of those crucial intervention points that we all have to take part in somehow. The first thing to do is to really get up to speed on what [the bill] means. And if I can do it, if I can learn about the farm bill and become a semi-wonk, anyone can do that. Policy is not what gets me up in the morning.

Q.How does this farm bill process compare to the one Congress engaged in back in 2008?

A. This recession has had a huge impact on the hungry and the poor—and on the nutrition side of the farm bill. When I wrote the last book I think it was about 50 percent of all the appropriations were going to nutrition. But now it’s up to 75 percent. So that’s a big difference.

Then the Renewable Fuels Act passed, basically mandating this huge jump in ethanol production. And we had global price spikes for commodities. So all of a sudden there’s this huge expansion of agriculture. Crop prices are really strong, so the deficiency payments have gone down.

However, what is increasing now is federally funded crop insurance. And taxpayers are funding both the amount the farmer pays as well as a portion of what the insurance companies pay out. So all of a sudden crop insurance is bigger than the commodity subsidies. And it’s a very different economic climate for agriculture than it was in 2008.

When the 2008 bill passed, the speaker of the house at the time, Nancy Pelosi, said, “The farm bill used to be my least informed vote. Now I know more about it than almost any other legislation.” And that was because the reformers kept the pressure on that year. We had more people than ever watching food democracy in action.

Now you have public expectation really racing far ahead of [federal] policy. The food movement is just exploding. Here’s one example: In 2010, a group in Seattle started buying a box of Food Fight at a time, until they’d bought 100 books. And then Seattle came out with its own farm bill platform. What they were saying is, “Even though we’re an urban area, federal policy is important to us. We have people growing food in the city, we have people who are hungry, we have obesity, and we have inadequate food being fed to our kids. And we have this food movement that’s growing.”

Those are a few of the big changes.

Q.In the book you write, “The next farm bill may well end up propping up the industrial agriculture complex with billions of annual taxpayer dollars, as it has done for decades. But this issue is far too important to go down without a serious debate.” From what I can tell, the hearings currently going on in Congress are essentially farm state congressmen and Big Ag lobbyists talking to each other. How do we create a real, two-sided debate?

A. It’s a campaign finance issue. Food reformers could create a PAC, take a few lessons from Stephen Colbert, get a few million people to contribute some money, and start to make some noise. But that would require that we have a serious platform that we were working off of.

So I go back to the people—people who all of a sudden are coming out in big numbers to hear about food and farm policy, or to take a course on butchering, or raise chickens in their backyard, or whatever—let’s go to them. Let’s get their cities to adopt healthy food platforms, and begin to work with their lobbyists and their representatives from outside the Senate and House agriculture committees, because I think the ag committees are stacked heavily toward rural commodity states.

I see this as the Olympics. It comes around just every couple years. You want your team to show up, and the fans to show up, and you want to watch. And if you feel like the judging is rigged and your team’s not getting a fair shake, then you have to find a way to protest that. And that’s kind of where we’re at.

Q.Will the proposed crop insurance subsidies benefit many actual farmers who are on the ground? Or will most of it go to wealthy factory farm owners, like the Environmental Working Group suggests in this post?

A. There’s a real need to have a healthy, robust dialogue around eligibility and caps on how much someone can get. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for some kind of yardstick. The questions we need to ask are, who is actually a farmer, and what are the qualifications for the safety net? What should it cover under what circumstances, and what do we get back? What’s the social contract?

What you find now is a farm lobby that won’t really engage in that conversation. So [farm subsidies] are the ultimate entitlement programs. This direct payment scheme we have right now, it’s almost feudal. You get the money whether or not you farm, whether or not you’ve lost any money. Now they’re saying we’re going to take the direct payments off the table and instead we want crop insurance. What they really want is revenue insurance without any conservation compliance attached.

Without that, we have no choice but to ask who is a “family farmer”? And who really deserves that safety net? I would like to see us go back to the very beginning of the farm bill, where conservation was the most basic foundation of this social contract we have. So if a land owner is making a serious efforts to take care of the land, to do things that the market won’t pay them for—say, protecting wildlife, filtering water, or reducing nitrogen fertilizer use—that’s the kind of thing where we taxpayers get a really big benefit.

Right now we pay them to glut the market with what the industrial food system wants. Their argument is they’re “feeding the world.” My question is could we better serve ourselves by trying to feed ourselves differently and by rewarding farmers differently. Yes there are a lot of overcapitalized family farmers who would really suffer if you take away the subsidies. It is a safety net for some, but there’s also a point at which the subsidies become a vehicle by which a big farm can get bigger. They can use that income—federal taxpayer-funded income—to lease more land, get more mechanization, and take out more habitat. So where’s the line? The guys who are grossing half a million in sales see it as less of a safety net and more of an income stream.

Q.As you see it, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have benefited from conservation funding as well. Say more about that.

A. The farm bill is essentially a CAFO Bill. It’s pretty heavily skewed toward the industrial animal system that we have — toward growing the feed for, and cleaning up after, livestock. [In the 2002 and 2008 farm bills, hundreds of millions of dollars went to clean up CAFO waste through a program called Environmental Quality Incentives Program.]

What factory gets this huge taxpayer cost share to comply with the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts? CAFOs have tapped into a program that was originally for small landowners to help them keep animals near waterways. And instead, since 2002, CAFOs have pretty much taken over that program and now it’s a toxic animal waste management fund.

In the meantime, there’s a waiting list of people who want to restore wetlands, protect prairies, and do all kind of important conservation work.

A. They’re bright, but for me they just don’t have enough zeros attached. The Local Food, Farms, and Jobs act seems to have a lot of support. But it’s only around $100 million per year, over five years. That works out to about $2 million per state. That’s really not much.

It’s great that the reform groups are really honing in on what’s important—more money for local food, preserving SNAP assistance, supporting beginning farmers, etc.

You have more and more companies looking to buy antibiotic-free, humane meat raised on pasture (Chipotle, Bon Appétit Management Company, etc.) And you also have groups that are extremely worried about the Mississippi watershed. And the only way to solve both of those challenges is to increase the amount of land in permanent pasture. So at some point we’re going to have to talk about grass-based perennial agriculture.

In the short term, however, I think we can get five times as many people watching as this part of our democracy takes place than we did last time. (You want to at least know that your team is watching the games!) And for me that’s a victory in itself.

Things have been pretty tense on Michigan’s small pig farms over the past few days. Farmers who own rare heritage pigs in particular have been waiting anxiously, hoping the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) doesn’t show up to arrest them — or even kill their pigs.

As of April 1, the Michigan DNR was slated to start enforcing an order put in place last fall that classified wild boars as an invasive species. What does it have to do with farmers? It turns out the classification — which is based on a set of physical characteristics, such as straight ears, dark snouts, and a tendency toward stripes in their young — also includes many of the heritage animals kept on farms in the state. (Many farmers in the area raise an extra-fatty specialty breed called Mangalitsa, but they tend to cross them with heartier European hogs so they can withstand the cold Michigan winters).

Invasive wild boars have devastated many Southern states, so in a lot of ways the order has been an easy sell to some Michigan residents. Apparently 340 feral swine had been counted roaming in 72 of the state’s 83 counties. But most of those are thought to have escaped from the state’s wild game ranches — fenced-off areas populated with wild game for recreational hunting — not small farms. And farmers are making the point that pigs are smart animals; once they’re domesticated it’s very unlikely that they’ll ever leave a regular source of food.

When a bill that would have regulated the hunting ranches in the state legislature was stalled last year, the Michigan Pork Producers Association (who claim the presence of wild boar threatens their industry) stepped in to lobby for the invasive species order.

Farmers in the area are outraged. Mark Baker, of Baker’s Green Acres, makes his sole living off his farm, and has been especially outspoken on the issue. He’s filed a lawsuit against the DNR in hopes of getting a temporary stay against the order. In this video, which has been watched over 50,000 times (see below), he can be seen defending his animals and drawing a direct link between the invasive species order and the Michigan pork lobby. “The people who grow pigs in confinement … those are the guys who don’t want guys like me growing pigs out in the dirt. And they’ve employed the DNR to come after us, and they’ve said that our pigs spread disease when they go feral. They have this notion that our pigs are scratcing at the fence waiting to get away.”

The day after the order went into effect, a friend of Baker’s wrote on his blog:

We spent a very long day on Sunday waiting to hear trucks come down the dirt road in front of Mark’s house. Mark, Jill, the children and a few friends that Mark wanted to have with him, if the situation unfolded and the DNR came to kill his pigs.

Like Baker, Stuart Kunkle of Bricolage Farm says he’s keeping his pigs, even if it makes him a felon.

“Almost all of my pigs have some characteristics that put me in violation,” he says. But he’s willing to get arrested rather than end the lives of the animals he’s been raising, which include a heritage breed called a Mulefoot that also happens to be “the rarest swine in America” (as in, ahem, they are deserving of preservation — pretty much the exact opposite of invasive).

Kunkle is aware that many raw-milk advocates, known for their single-minded focus, have allied themselves with his cause and have also been spreading about the invasive species order, calling it “a war on family pig farmers” that will involve hundreds of arrests of ranchers. That might sound typically alarmist, but he believes they might actually be hitting closer to the mark than usual.

“It’s kind of like the raw milk issue, but it takes it a little further,” he says. “This isn’t just talking about a fringe product that people may or may not have a feeling about, this gets a little closer to the heart of something. Whether you eat pork or not, if you look at how these animals are raised — and typically it’s way better than their CAFO counterpart — you can quickly gain some kind of sympathy about this.”

Striped coloration on young pigs is one characteristic that could qualify them as invasive species in Michigan. (Photo by Norro.)

Around 2,000 farmers in Michigan have 500 or fewer animals, and many have much fewer. Don Coe, a member of the state’s Commission on Agriculture, raises just two Mangalitsa mixes a year. Coe was watching closely as a bill to control the state’s hunting ranches moved through both the house and senate before stalling when the pork industry got involved.

“Michigan Pork had brought Michigan soy and corn producers to the table to say they didn’t want to see hunting ranches regulated, they wanted to see the invasive species order,” he recalls. “So they went around the commission on agriculture.”

Hines says they’ve trapped a number of feral pigs and have tested them for diseases, including pseudorabies.

“It’s not something that humans would get, but it’s devastating to some species of livestock. If that virus gets disseminated to the domestic or commercial swine herd in this state, we would become quarantined. It would be economically devastating to our producers,” he said.

But so far, he admits, the transfer of pseudorabies from feral pigs to domesticated hogs has not occurred.

Coe, who runs a CSA and an inn, and has started a small charcuterie business with the meat from the pigs he raises, considers himself a moderate voice on the issue and hopes the two sides can come to an agreement. “The local food movement is growing in this area; let’s do what we can not to turn Big Ag and small ag against each other,” he says. Coe and other farmers he knows are willing to pay a fee to keep their pigs, and he’d even consider putting a microchip in their ears, like pet owners do with dogs and cats.

But Kunkle feels that paying a fine to raise his animals or have them implanted with microchips would be a form of surrender to the Michigan DNR and the corporate forces behind it.

Ultimately, Coe also recognizes the larger systematic problems at work in his state. “The answer in my mind is not to give the DNR the authority to declare various animals invasive or ban them,” he says. “What’s the next breed they’re going to go after? Llamas? Some special breed of heritage turkeys? This whole thing has been driven by special interest.”

Coe adds that the state has a deer problem the DNR has yet to solve.“If you’re so concerned about an animal causing damage, then why do we have 67,000 deer/car collisions in this state a year? DNR’s job is to manage animals in the wild and the Department of Agriculture’s is to manage animals on farms.”

Now, four days after the order took effect, it’s unclear whether any pigs have actually been killed or removed from farms.

Ed Golder, spokesman for the Michigan DNR, told a reporter from Michigan Live, “Our hope is to be invited onto farms voluntarily,” where they could inspect pigs and ask farmers to “handle the depopulation on their own.” Which makes you wonder: Has he met many of today’s small farmers? Someone who has gone through the work to raise a rare breed of pig on pasture isn’t likely to give the animal up without a fight.

But one thing is clear: Many outside Michigan are keeping an eye on the situation, including officials from states looking to follow suit — like Pennsylvania, Kansas, and New York. As Mark Baker says in the video below, “There are 10 other states watching what Michigan does, and if Michigan gets away with this and they’re able to declare that one of my farm animals is an invasive species and therefore outlawed, where does it end?”

Filed under: Article, Food, Locavore]]>http://grist.org/locavore/michigan-threatens-small-farms-by-calling-heritage-pigs-invasive/feed/0mangalitsa_pigstwilightgreenawayheritage_pigmangalitsa_pigsIs your favorite restaurant faking organic? There’s only one way to know for surehttp://grist.org/sustainable-food/is-your-favorite-restaurant-faking-organic-heres-the-only-way-to-know-for-sure/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_locavore
http://grist.org/sustainable-food/is-your-favorite-restaurant-faking-organic-heres-the-only-way-to-know-for-sure/#commentsWed, 04 Apr 2012 12:07:21 +0000http://grist.org/?p=90988]]>How often do you find yourself in a restaurant with a menu that reads, “We serve organic produce when possible”? And how much stock should you put into vague phrases like, “All our ingredients are sustainable”?

You’d be right to be suspicious: Some chefs are faking it as the demand for organic rises. And many savvy eaters can sniff out the real deal. (Does the chef name-check source farms on the menu? Can they be seen making pickups at the local farmers market?) Still, none of these guessing games really guarantee the origin of every ingredient. And in truth, unless the restaurant in question is certified organic, there is no real way to know.

As a chef who’s committed to organics (I grew up on a certified organic farm), and as a customer myself, I’ve been frustrated by the greenwashing I’ve observed. There are literally thousands of restaurants around the country using the word “organic” in their name and/or marketing materials — and indeed, most probably do source at least some organic foods. But just how much, or how often, is unknown to everyone outside their kitchens.

One solution is to visit a restaurant that is itself certified organic (meaning they’ve been through their own separate certification process and the statements they make on their menus have been verified by an independent party). The problem? Certified restaurants are few and far between. In fact, there are only eight in the entire United States — four in Seattle, and only one each in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Austin, and Carmel, Calif.

Ryan Kellner, owner of Mighty–O Donuts in Seattle, is planning to make his shop the ninth certified organic restaurant in the country. Like most of us, he was shocked to hear that there are still so few. “We know of two of them and they’re within walking distance of our shop,” he says. “What’s up with the rest of the country?!” Kellner is currently working with Oregon Tilth — a nonprofit that certifies farmers, processors, retailers, and food handlers throughout the U.S. — to start the process.

To be clear, there’s nothing to stop restaurant owners from serving organic produce, meat, dairy, etc. regardless of whether the restaurant itself is certified. While the United Stated Department of Agriculture oversees other organic certifications, there is no requirement for restaurants to become certified. It’s purely optional. And even Oregon Tilth, the primary restaurant certifier to date, acknowledges that the process is in place mainly for purists who want to lead by example and take their transparency to the next level.

What does organic certification actually mean for a restaurant? Oregon Tilth’s Darryl Williams, the person in charge of the process, says this voluntary certification is actually “a very vigorous process,” in part to prevent greenwashing.

Williams works with Oregon Tilth’s clients to develop an Organic System Plan, which they verify with an annual on-site audit. Every product that comes into the restaurant is tracked with an individual lot number, and both organic and conventional products have to be clearly and systematically separated. Then the restaurant must specify, “on their menu or in another publicly available document, what is or is not organic.”

But this is just the beginning. Storage and food preparation practices must also prevent commingling of organic and conventional ingredients. Organic ingredients also must be stored above conventional ones, and separate cutting boards must be kept and maintained. Oregon Tilth goes farther still, mandating how restaurants use cleaning products and control pests, and monitoring the steam from their boilers.

In other words, getting certified is no easy task.

D.C.'s Restaurant Nora was the first to achieve organic certification in 1999. Since then only seven more restaurants have joined the fray.

Nora Pouillon, the chef/owner of Restaurant Nora in Washington, D.C., was the first to get certified with Oregon Tilth in 1999, and she spent two years working with the organization to develop standards. Looking back now, Nora reflects on how difficult and time-consuming that process was for her, but it hasn’t stopped her from encouraging other chefs to use the framework she helped put in place.

But she also clearly understands the barriers. “It’s such a commitment in time and money,” she says. At Restaurant Nora, she has a full-time person on staff to maintain the details involved in certification. If she ran a more casual establishment — entrees at Pouillon’s restaurant run from $29 to $36, and a tasting menu is $78 — this expense would be impossible.

James Beard Award–winning chef Maria Hines owns two organic restaurants, Golden Beetle and Tilth (no relation to the certifier) in Seattle. For Hines, the decision to go organic was an easy one. “I eat organic at home and when I decided to open up the restaurant and had the option to do what I wanted, I decided to spend every cent in a way that reduces harm to the planet and our health.”

Hines admits the certification has also been very hard financially, but adds, “I had been running kitchens for over 15 years before opening Tilth, so I had the fortune of being crafty with food cost, eliminating food waste, etc. This gave me the financial edge to make it work.”

Taken together, certification requirements ensure that all restaurant operations are completely integrated at the highest level. Owners, chefs, servers, and kitchen staff have to work in concert to comply with organic regulations, and this is perhaps why the vast majority of certified restaurants have chefs who are also owners.

I don’t have the ability to certify the kitchens I manage. Despite my commitment to the organic movement, my kitchens operate without outside certification. Looking forward, however, I anticipate more and more restaurant owners will choose organic certification as a way to differentiate their operations in the increasingly competitive restaurant environment.

Talking about all the costs associated with the certification, Pouillon had to pause and take a breath. Then she resumed, “It is not easy. But if you’re passionate and you believe in it, not only for your health but also for the health of this planet, I don’t see how you can do anything else.”

Foraging for food — whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot — is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the DIY set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.

But an old-fashioned concept — gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens — is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.

In cities, rural communities, and suburbs across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect bags and boxes of fruits and vegetables that find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

Where some may see excess, others see opportunity — the chance to make a difference, feed the hungry, and avoid waste. It’s a win-win-win all round: Growers who have surplus or seconds find a good home for these edibles beyond the compost pile; financially strapped aid organizations get much-needed fresh food for free for their patrons; and the gleaners get to give back in their communities. “I’ve been surprised at how emotionally rewarding this is,” says Andrew Sigal, an avid gardener in Oakland, Calif., who started Food Pool last summer to share the abundance from his prolific 800-square-foot garden with local food pantries. “It’s one thing to give someone in need a dollar or a donation, but seeing someone get excited about beans from my backyard has been deeply fulfilling.”

Some gleaners have even made a national name for themselves. Take The Lemon Lady, aka Anna Chan, a stay-at-home mom who began collecting excess fruit in suburban Clayton, Calif., while driving her then-baby daughter around to nap. Chan, who knew hunger as a child and how it felt to wait in food lines for canned goods, was shocked to see so much fresh fruit — such as oranges, apricots, and apples — left rotting in her neighbors’ front yards, so she started a single-handed campaign to do something about it.

Three years on and hundreds of tons of produce later, Chan, who is now a regular fixture at local farmers markets where she collects unsold fruits and vegetables that she hauls to a local food pantry and Salvation Army site, has been featured in People, The Huffington Post, and Civil Eats. While the press attention has helped her cause, she keeps a laser-like focus on her mission to feed those in need. “Many people don’t know where their local food pantry is located and don’t realize that food banks will gladly take fresh produce,” says Chan, who encourages people to get started by picking excess fruits and veggies in their immediate area and passing it on.

From California to New York and places in between, communities are finding creative, local ways to get fresh food to the residents who have the most challenges accessing such food. Glean for the City in Washington, D.C., for example, has a three-pronged approach: picking surplus produce from regional farms, gathering leftover greens from farmers markets, and harvesting excess residential edibles.

Since 1988, Friendship Donations Network (FDN) in Ithaca, N.Y., has worked with local farmers to “rescue” thousands of pounds of produce that would otherwise go to waste and to distribute it to low-wage workers, the elderly, and the young. Gleaned produce donated by the organization serves 24 programs that feed more than 2,000 people a week. The model just makes sense, says FDN program coordinator Meaghan Sheehan Rosen, who points out that there’s no reason perfectly good food should go uneaten if farmers are willing and people are needy.

Some gleaning efforts have grown out of religious organizations — not surprising, since the term has biblical origins. In the Book of Ruth, for instance, the poor are permitted to pick grain left over from the harvest. The Society of St. Andrew, based in Virginia, has gleaning groups in several states including Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have collectively gleaned millions of pounds of produce. Faith Feeds, a Lexington, Ky., gleaning group that grew out of a church meeting, has picked up more than 111,000 pounds of produce since the summer of 2010, from farmers markets, farms, and private residences. “It is not hard to feed the hungry,” says Jennifer Erena of Faith Feeds, an interfaith group not affiliated with any particular religion or church. “The word is spreading and there’s a wonderful energy among different people and organizations that is both collaborative and community oriented.”

There are gleaning programs that connect homeowners overwhelmed by an abundant harvest with volunteers willing to pick produce and take it to local food banks, such as Portland Fruit Tree Project in Oregon. But many gleaning efforts are simply started by an individual who sees a need and wants to fill it. “I particularly like picking fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a ladder or aren’t able to do physical labor anymore,” says North Berkeley Harvest founder Natasha Boissier, who started solo but now works with a group of volunteers. “They come out and talk with me while I work, and I appreciate and respect their wisdom and experience, and hearing about the ups and downs of having lived life. These moments of connection have brought me — and I hope them — a great deal of unexpected joy.”

Boissier’s first stop with fresh food is often the local men’s shelter. “These men are often blamed for what’s wrong with them,” says the clinical social worker. “I see them early in the morning standing out in the cold after enduring a night of who knows what and I want to give them a piece of fruit to offer a moment’s respite from their pain and suffering. That’s my hope: to provide something tangible, simple, and sweet in their lives.”

Portland Fruit Tree Project plums get distributed to those who have less access to fresh food. (Photo by Sarah Gilbert.)

Some gleaning programs have become an integral part of their community. Take the Novato Schools Gleaning Program. Every week for the past six years, parents, students, and members of this Marin County, Calif., community glean excess organic produce from a participating local farm. (There are about 15 in the program.) Through a partnership with Marin Organic, a cooperative association of local growers, fresh chard picked by a volunteer on Monday finds its way into school pasta sauce later in the week. The gleaned fruits and vegetables now offset up to 25 percent of the district’s weekly produce, according to Miguel Villarreal, the director of food and nutrition services for the small school district, where some 4,000 meals a day are dished up at 13 schools.

For Villarreal, who has worked in school food for 30 years and grew up helping pick crops with his parents in the fields, the program is a no-brainer. “There is so much beautiful abundance in this area and our school food program can use all the help it can get,” says Villarreal, who sees educational and community-building benefits to the program, as well.

Others raise some unexpected benefits of gleaning. Melita Love, of Farm to Pantry in Healdsburg, Calif., found a community of people in her new hometown when she started gleaning. Love has collaborated with local preservers to extend the shelf life of the bounty she and her crew harvest in such staples as applesauce and tomato sauce — think canning for a cause — that food pantry patrons can pick up along with gleaned fresh goods. She’s also worked with local groups to explain to patrons how to use produce that may be unfamiliar. “The first time we dropped off kale to a food pantry nobody took it because they didn’t know what to do with it,” says Love. “So we did cooking demos for kale salad, kale chips, and a winter soup with kale, and we handed out recipes, too. Education is an important part of any gleaning effort.”

Food Pool’s Sigal points out that a group of gardeners who share their backyard bounty with less fortunate folk in his community have gone a step further, funding and constructing a community garden at a local food pantry where there was once an unused piece of land. “A year ago, most of these people didn’t even know there was a food pantry there,” he says. “There’s this incredible value in creating community that goes beyond just sharing surplus fresh food.”

Sure, it’s green to raise chickens in your backyard, but it’s a tragedy that they have to live in rough-hewn, generic coops. What about your chickens’ sense of style and feng shui? Luckily, Williams-Sonoma takes this problem seriously. The company is launching a new “Agrarian” line of products, so that your chickens can live in as classy as house as you do.

As of this month, when the new line debuts, Williams-Sonoma — best known for outfitting yuppie kitchens everywhere with high-end cookware — has now got you covered for all your heirloom seed, backyard beehive, and kombucha-making needs. There’s also an oh-so-attractive shiitake-mushroom log, so you can grow your own mushrooms while also contributing to your home’s rustic-chic charm.

I’m all for backyard agriculture. But if you’re spending hundreds of dollars (I’m guessing at the price point here) on a chicken coop that’s then shipped across the country, you should probably assume you’re doing more to shore up the powerful forces of consumerism than to help the local food movement or the planet.

But if this is your jam, you can sign up to get more news when the line officially launches.

A community-supported agriculture (CSA) share can be a culinary battle royale. Every other week, it’s you versus a mystery box. No tap outs, no substitutions. Just a bitter melon so fresh, you wouldn’t dare toss it out. And while there’s something to be said for experimentation, sometimes you just want something a little more familiar, something easy to pack for lunch, something the kids will touch. Or maybe you’re just having a mad craving for heirloom radishes?

That’s where Plovgh enters the picture. The online marketplace soft-launched in November 2011, and hopes to offer an alternative to the traditional CSA and farmers market systems by allowing customers to order exactly what and how much they want from local farms while still getting it delivered to their neighborhood. Sites like Local Dirt and Local Harvest connect online customers to farms, but neither will bring groceries to your neighborhood bar. And while food hubs can distribute food to schools, restaurants, and other groups with big local food needs, Plovgh (pronounced “plow”) brings all those perks to individuals — even those who might only cook once a week.

Here’s how it works: Farmers report what they’ll be harvesting for the week on Monday afternoon and customers order exactly which foods they want from Tuesday through Thursday for weekend pick-ups. The website will undergo plenty of spruce-ups through the summer, but the basic functions are up and running. Organic produce, pasture-raised meat, and foodie extras like pickles, maple syrup, and honey are listed based on the pick-up spot (usually bars or cafes — nothing washes down local produce like a noontime beer), and sorted by neighborhood and time. You click, pay, and voila: A few days later your food arrives down the block.

The system works for farmers, too. Often, they plant and harvest food to bring to market without a guarantee that it will sell. As farms with CSAs work to provide more flexibility for consumers, that’s shifting for the better. In the case of Plovgh, the company has also coordinated transportation efforts, so that they can essentially carpool their food. (Sadly, this still wouldn’t qualify solo drivers for the carpool lane.) Sometimes an area farmer does the driving; other times, it’s just someone who lives in the neighborhood and is looking for extra income.

“Nothing is harvested until it is sold, so we waste less produce and labor than harvesting for a farmers market,” says Amoreen Armetta, who runs the New Paltz, N.Y., farm Partners Trace with her partner Tierney Dearing Medick. “Plovgh also picks up our orders so we don’t have to drive the two hours down to the city,” she adds.

The food is offered at the same or lower prices than one would find at the farmers market. That’s because like food hubs, this process cuts down on time spent selling food and prevents waste. Plovgh doesn’t need a building to operate out of, either; it relies on existing public spaces like restaurants and community centers. By using technology for many of the logistics — like taking and organizing orders, scheduling pick-ups, and delivering to the customer — Plovgh is able to cut down significantly on costly people power.

“The supply chain mentality is emblematic of an old way of doing business that is becoming irrelevant,” says founder Elizabeth McVay Greene. “Food hubs take the supply chain notion and apply it to local food. We’re trying to blast that whole notion of a supply chain out of the water.”

Currently, Plovgh is only operating in pilot mode, with approximately a dozen farms in the greater New York City area. But Greene hopes to fully develop the website by the end of the year, so don’t be too surprised if Plovgh networks start popping up in other U.S. cities soon. (Look out, Atlanta! Greene is in talks with nearby farmers.)

New York is a great testing ground for the program because several aspects of traditional CSA drop-off programs — like large upfront payments — make them “especially hard in big, urban areas,” Greene says. The weekly commitment and lack of choice with CSAs throw red flags up faster for New Yorkers than most other eaters, especially younger urbanites. “It’s a lot to ask of someone whose life is ever-evolving,” she says. “That lack of flexibility is weird because we’ve become used to an age of choice.” It helps, at least, that many New Yorkers are already aware of CSAs and comfortable buying food directly from the farmer ― which isn’t necessarily the case, she says, in states like Mississippi.

The final goal for Plovgh is to provide a technological platform for farmers, customers, transporters, and potential pick-up sites across the U.S. and beyond, which would allow them to coordinate amongst themselves. “The notion is that a farmer in India could use this and sell to people in Mumbai,” Greene says. In fact, she was inspired to create Plovgh after working with rural cotton farmers in India to help bring their products to urban markets. “It’s a very distributed model. We’re taking resources that already exist at the farm and neighborhood level and putting them to use.”